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K 



AMERICAN IDEALS 
CHARACTER AND LIFE 



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AMERICAN IDEALS 
CHARACTER AND LIFE 



BY 

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 



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This book printed and bound at 
Chautauqua, New York 



Copyright, 1913, 
By The Atlantic Monthly Company. 

Copyright, 1913, 
By The Macmillan Company. 






1915 

The Chautauqua Print Shop 
Chautauqua, New York 



«3 

cr 



PREFACE 

In the Preface to his illuminating volume 
"The Japanese Nation: Its Land and Its 
People," Dr. Inazo Nitobe explains concisely 
the circumstances which led to its publica- 
tion: " The idea of sending public men of note 
unofficially from this country to Japan and 
from Japan to the United States, owes its 
inception to Mr. Hamilton Holt of New York 
City. When his plan had been developed to 
a certain degree of feasibility, the task of car- 
rying it into effect was accepted by President 
Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia Uni- 
versity, in whose hands the idea took the 
more practical, if the less ambitious, form of 
an exchange professorship, and he interested 
certain typical universities to join in putting 
it into effect. After the enterprise was fairly 
launched, the responsibility for its continu- 
ance was passed on to. and made a part of, the 
work of the Carnegie Peace Endowment." 

v 



PREFACE 

It may be added that one form of the work 
of this Endowment is an effort, by Exchange 
Professorships, or Lectureships, to make the 
different peoples better acquainted with one 
another, and to lay the foundations of inter- 
national peace in international knowledge. 
Ignorance is the prolific source, of race preju- 
dice and hostility; it creates the conditions 
which make race bigots, light-minded public 
men, and irresponsible newspapers dangerous 
foes to the highest interests of the world. 

Dr. Nitobe was happily chosen as the first 
Exchange Professor from Japan, and his ad- 
dresses delivered in six representative uni- 
versities and before learned and popular 
organizations were listened to with great in- 
terest ; and, published in book form by Messrs. 
G. P. Putnam's Sons, present an interpreta- 
tion of the Japanese people at once deeply 
interesting and authoritative. 

It was the good fortune of the writer of this 
book to be sent to Japan on the same Endow- 
ment as the first Exchange Professor, or, to be 
more accurate, Lecturer, from the United 
States, and to receive from government offi- 

vi 



PREFACE 

cials, from the universities, from schools, from 
organizations, both public and private, and 
from numberless persons in private life, cour- 
tesies which gave kindness new qualities of 
charm and delicate consideration. In the 
course of six months' travel and the delivery 
of nearly eighty addresses in Japan, Korea, 
and Manchuria, there was never an hour of 
loneliness. From the day when wireless mes- 
sages of welcome began to greet the visitors, 
three days out, to the day when they followed 
the home-coming steamer three days at sea, 
there was the unfailing consciousness of being 
surrounded by friends. 

From the addresses delivered in the Impe- 
rial Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, the pri- 
vately endowed or supported universities of 
Waseda and Keio and the Doshisha, in many 
schools and before many popular audiences, 
the chapters in this book, with a single excep- 
tion, have been selected and are presented 
substantially as they were delivered. The 
chapter on "The American in Art,'' reprinted 
by the courtesy of the editor of the Atlantic 
Monthly Magazine, is included to give greater 

vii 



PREFACE 

completeness to this outline sketch of Ameri- 
can society and life. It must not be forgotten 
that these addresses were delivered to audi- 
ences of unusual intellectual alertness and re- 
markable knowledge of the English language, 
but who were largely unfamiliar with Ameri- 
can history and institutions. No attempt has 
been made to do more, on the historical side, 
than to sketch with a free hand and in large 
outline, the development of the American 
people, bringing into view only those events 
which have contributed to that development 
and disclose and interpret the American spirit. 
If this book shall serve as an introductory 
sketch of a nation which, like Japan, is often 
misrepresented and misunderstood, its purpose 
will be accomplished. 



H. W. M. 



Seal Harbor, Mb., 
August 16, 1913. 



• •• 
Vlll ' 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Clearing the Way .... 1 

II. Discovery and Exploration . . 34 

III. Possessing the Continent ... 61 

IV. Provincial America in Literature . 91 
V. Sectional Literature . . . .128 

VI. National Literature .... 158 

VII. The American in Art . . . .189 

VIII. School and College .... 214 

IX. University and Research Work . 245 

X. The American and his Government . 267 

XI. Country and People .... 295 



IX 



AMERICAN IDEALS, CHARACTER 
AND LIFE 

I 

CLEARING THE WAY 

For many years past Japan has held a 
first place in the interest of Americans, and 
they have followed its extraordinary and 
brilliant career, not only with admiration, but 
with an ardent desire to know the historical 
sources of a national strength directed with 
such intelligence and used with such efficiency. 
They were quick to perceive that a people 
does not suddenly appear on the stage of 
the world in command of such moral and 
physical forces unless it has been subjected 
to a severe discipline of spirit and mind, and 
they have been eager to discover the secret 
of modern Japan in the ideals and education 
of old Japan. This combination of subtle 
artistic instinct and skill with high military 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

efficiency; in what age-long training of eye, 
of imagination, of will, was it made possible ? 
This inbred courtesy unimpaired by a swiftly 
acquired practical efficiency, this capacity 
for suddenly changing tools and weapons and 
yet using them with veteran ease and skill 
— the explanation of this vigor of the fiber 
of character and this facile intelligence lies 
deep in the history of old Japan; and there 
we have searched and fancied we have found 
it in the interpretations of a large group of 
native and foreign students and observers. 
And so there has been born in the hearts of 
intelligent Americans an admiration for the 
Japanese nation at once historical and pro- 
phetic ; a deep respect for what has been ac- 
complished, a keen anticipation of a career 
in the near and far future full of dramatic 
possibilities of achievement on the higher 
planes of civilization. 

We have tried to understand Japan by 
gaining access to its fundamental ideas of 
life and character : those ideas of which its 
activities have been a varied but unified ex- 
pression. It is my hope to make my own 

% 



CLEARING THE WAY 

country in some small measure more com- 
prehensible by definition of its historic ideas, 
its inheritance of religious, ethical and political 
convictions, the physical conditions under 
which it has been compelled to work out its 
vital problems and fashion its political in- 
stitutions; to bring before you, so far as I 
am able, the American behind his political 
and business activities. This is no light task 
and is not approached in a light spirit. The 
long separation of the East and the West has 
made it difficult for the men of the East and 
the men of the West to understand one 
another; but I utterly reject the idea that 
they cannot understand one another; that 
differences of landscape, climate, religion, 
political and social ideal, have been so wrought 
into temperament and character that a per- 
manent barrier has been built between the 
East and West. Such a barrier may exist 
for a little time in the minds of men of selfish 
interest and narrow racial feeling, but it has 
never risen in the minds of men of vision East 
or West ; and the future belongs not to traders 
and race bigots, but to men who, in states- 

3 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

manship and in commerce, recognize that the 
world, which has become a neighborhood, is 
on the way to become a brotherhood. 

The German poet Goethe, one of the most 
penetrating thinkers and critics of the West, 
declared that the prime quality of the real 
critic is sympathy. There is no other ap- 
proach to a man or a race. Men rarely un- 
derstand that which they hate, but they 
rarely fail to understand that which they love. 
There was in the London of the time of Charles 
Lamb, that master of the essay of sentiment 
and humor, a man who was widely detested 
because he was of a peculiarly irritating dull- 
ness of mind. This man's name came up one 
day in conversation, and Lamb was asked if he 
did not hate him. "How can I hate a man I 
know?" was the illuminating answer of a 
writer who knew well the weaknesses of his 
fellows because he knew his own frailties. 
The French maxim, that to know all would be 
to forgive all, may need some qualification ; 
but distrust, dislike and hatred are so often 
conceived in ignorance and born in blindness 

of mind that the truth at the heart of it may 

I 



CLEARING THE WAY 

be safety accepted as a guide to judgment, 
and especially to international judgment. 
The beginning of wisdom in these matters is 
an open mind and the readiness to approach 
a nation along its own highways. 

No man can understand a foreign people 
until he studies them in the light of their own 
ideals. France is a closed book to the Eng- 
lishman or American who does not recognize 
at the start that in that country the social 
unit is the family, while among the English- 
speaking peoples the social unit is the individ- 
ual. The French and English misunderstood 
one another for centuries, because they held 
stubbornly to certain preconceptions instead 
of approaching one another with open minds ; 
and only lately, discarding old-time popular 
prejudgments, have they begun to recognize 
the great qualities which other peoples have 
seen in both nations. A nation of shop- 
keepers does not produce Tennysons, Darwins, 
Gladstones and Gordons ; nor does a frivolous 
people given over to amusement, produce 
Gambettas, Pasteurs, Brunetieres. 

It has been the good fortune of Japan to 
& 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

disarm many foreign critics at the very start 
and to lay a spell on many hard-minded but 
quick-spoken judges who would otherwise 
have been harsh judges of a people they ap- 
proached with the preconceptions of the West- 
ern mind ; but even Japan, most courteous of 
countries, has not escaped those who suspect 
everything that is strange and condemn every- 
thing they do not understand. 

No people, however, have borne a heavier 
burden of misunderstanding than the Ameri- 
cans, and for very obvious reasons : differences 
of social structure and habit so radical and 
so fundamental that until they are taken into 
account the United States is, to the mind 
which approaches it from the European or 
the Oriental point of view, a vast and baffling 
confusion. From the very beginning there 
have been men and women who have gone to 
the Far West, as there have been those who 
have come to the Far East, not to judge, but 
to understand; and Americans are fortunate 
in possessing a small group of interpretations 
of their social and political life of classic 
quality. Between the hasty and ignorant 

6 



CLEARING THE WAY 

and the open-minded and intelligent ob- 
servers, the opinions expressed have been of 
such diversity that the American has reached 
a state of settled indifference toward average 
foreign opinion. He is told by one group of 
observers that his country is the home of 
materialism, that his people are crude, irrev- 
erent, indifferent to religion, to art, to cul- 
ture; and he is told by another group that 
his is the land of religious enthusiasts ; that 
he is a dreamer and a sentimentalist; that 
his supreme desire is not for money, but for 
education. 

Intelligent criticism is a far greater evidence 
of friendship than indiscriminate praise, and 
neither the strong man nor the strong people 
should shrink from its occasional sting. 
Truth may weaken the weak; it strengthens 
the strong. In this matter of international 
understanding, which may turn out to be the 
chief business of this century, truth-speaking 
is of prime importance. But let it be re- 
membered that the truth about a man or a 
nation is revealed to the sympathetic only ; 
to all others there is and can be no revelation 

7 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

of racial spirit and character. "Over the 
gateway of the twentieth century," wrote the 
noble German thinker and teacher, Fichte, 
"shall be written the words: 'this is the 
way to virtue, to justice and to peace." 
And that these great ends may be reached 
and this century fulfill this inspiring prophecy, 
these other words of a Latin writer ought to 
be in the mind of every man who endeavors 
to interpret the life of a people: "neither to 
laugh nor to cry, but to understand." 

During the dark days of the War between 
the States the North was astonished and 
bitterly disappointed by the attitude of many 
of the leaders of opinion in England. Forty 
years later in his Life of a great English states- 
man, Mr. Morley wrote: "Of this immense 
conflict Mr. Gladstone, like most leading 
statesmen of the time, and, like the majority 
of his own countrymen, failed to take the true 
measure. The error that lay at the root of 
our English misconceptions of the American 
struggle is now clear. We applied ordinary 
political maxims to what was not merely a 
political contest, but a social revolution." 

8 



CLEARING THE WAY 

It is the habit of applying the ordinary po- 
litical maxims of one country to the civiliza- 
tion of another country that has made a great 
deal of international comment like the game 
of blindman's buff played by children ; in 
which there is much running to and fro, 
much noise and general confusion, ending in 
guessing more or less shrewd. A distin- 
guished German student of American life 
describes one of his books as "a study of the 
Americans as the best of them are and the 
ethers should wish to be." Approached in 
this spirit, the student of a people may under- 
state the seriousness of the external evils 
which afflict every state ; he will almost 
unerringly discover the sources of its strength, 
and, above all, he will feel the throb of its 
vitality, which is the heartbeat of a nation. 

And this is far and away the most important 
fact to learn about a people; for the ulti- 
mate question never is, " How many diseases 
has a nation ? " The ultimate question always 
is, "How much vitality has it?" If it has a 
great store of vitality, its diseases are only 
episodes in its abundant life. It is easy to 

9 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

enumerate the diseases from which a nation 
is suffering, for they are largely external, and 
this is the chief occupation of the majority 
of international observers ; it requires in- 
sight, intelligence and sympathy to measure 
the vitality of a nation, and these qualities 
are lacking in the mass of observers, who are 
impressionists and whose opinions are colored, 
if not formed, by the superficial aspects of the 
life around them. There are perhaps half a 
dozen men in a generation in any country 
whose judgment on another country has 
value; there are many who are competent 
to report obvious conditions, to describe 
customs, to paint with charming skill the 
landscape which enfolds a nation's daily life ; 
but there are only an elect few qualified by 
nature as well as by training to uncover the 
character — that is to say, the significant 
ideals, the organized energy, the sustaining 
vitality — of a foreign people, or to set in 
contrast the strength and weakness of two 
civilizations. The beginning of wisdom in 
this field is, without any surrender of con- 
victions, to endeavor to understand and to 

10 



CLEARING THE WAY 

postpone judgment to a time of fuller light, 
to escape entirely from racial prejudices and 
national preconceptions, to see with large 
intelligence behind the eyes, and to put 
away distrust and antipathy with the armor 
and weapons and tools that have been super- 
seded by finer instruments. 

It is easier to understand one's own country 
than to understand other countries, but it is 
no easy task to interpret a people one may 
know intimately to the people of another 
country. And this task becomes especially 
difficult when a Japanese endeavors to in- 
terpret his people to Americans or an Ameri- 
can undertakes to reveal his people to the 
Japanese. But Japanese writers have suc- 
ceeded in rendering this great service to 
Americans, and an American need not despair 
of conveying to the Japanese a definite if 
very inadequate conception of his own 
country. It may be that the breadth of 
contrast between the historical background 
of Japan and the United States gives to each 
country a definiteness of outline which would 
be lacking if one were attempting to contrast 

11 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the United States with any European country, 
and that the distance which has separated 
the paths by which we have come may give 
us a deeper and more open-minded interest 
in one another. In this hope I venture to 
sketch on a large canvas and with a free hand 
the spirit of the youngest of the leading 
nations to one of the oldest ; a people spread 
over a continent to a people concentrated 
within island boundaries ; a people organized 
around the individual as a unit, though lack- 
ing neither filial nor national loyalty, to a 
people in whom a profound and mystical 
conception of the family has bred a spirit of 
reverence and obedience, a love of kindred, 
of ruler and of country, which have armed the 
empire at the very heart; a people drawn 
from many countries and fed by many races 
to a people unified by ancient community of 
religion, of political ideals and of social order 
and custom. 

If the chief end of civilization is to develop 
the genius of every race and to give every 
individual an opportunity of making his 
contribution to the welfare of the com- 

12 



CLEARING THE WAY 

munity of races which the world is fast be- 
coming, then the general movement which 
we call evolution will develop eventually, 
not uniformity of political and social con- 
ditions the world over, but the widest and 
richest diversities of political and social in- 
stitutions, of educational method, of the 
forms of expression of the religious nature. 
And the full and cordial recognition of the 
variety and diversity of the aims and skills 
and methods of civilization is the measure 
of a man's understanding of the modern 
world. 

To a man bred in another part of the world, 
the United States is a country of baffling 
confusion; he cannot understand its solidity 
and its apparent fluidity, its deep-rooted 
political convictions and its apparent indif- 
ference to political forms ; its essential con- 
servatism and the rapid growth of radical 
ideas in its atmosphere. 

The differences between the political and 
social structure of the older countries and of 
this new country are manifold, but there are 
three or four which must be taken into 

13 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

account at the very start if one is to get at the 
real character of the American people. 

In a community organized on the basis 
of equality in political privilege and before 
the law, the influence of highly developed 
standards of speech and manners is not 
supreme; it is left to establish itself by the 
long process of popular education. There 
are as many men and women of thorough 
education and ripeness of mind in the United 
States as in any other country, but they are 
not organized into a class, and they have 
never defined the standards of speech and 
manners. Whenever they have attempted 
to do this, a jealous democracy, entirely 
lacking in reverence for class distinctions, 
has overwhelmed them with ridicule. For 
superior education, for ability of a high order, 
for the finer aspects of character, there is 
great respect in the American community; 
but for any arrogation of social superiority, 
there is swift and contemptuous indignation^. 
Of the twenty-seven Presidents of the United 
States, nineteen have been men of university 
training; but three Presidents who have 

14 



CLEARING THE WAY 

lacked this training — Washington, Lincoln 
and Cleveland — have been statesmen and 
patriots whose conspicuous service to the 
Commonwealth has evidenced the educational 
influence which issues from the institutions 
and spirit of the country. Washington and 
Lincoln, born at the two extremes of society 
so far as social conditions are concerned, 
must be classed with Franklin and Emerson, 
among the most representative products of 
the popular education which is perhaps the 
most important function of the American 
system. In the election for President re- 
cently held in the United States there were 
three candidates for that high office ; of these 
one was a member of the governing body of 
Yale University ; another, after graduation 
from Princeton University and further study 
at the Johns Hopkins University, for ten 
years previous to his election as Governor of 
his State, had been president of Princeton 
University ; while the third is a member of the 
Board of Overseers of Harvard University, 
the oldest of American institutions of the 
higher rank, and is a man of notable intel- 

15 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

lectual achievements and accomplishments. 
Two of these gentlemen are historians and 
authors of distinction. From the beginning, 
public life in the United States has been 
crowded with men of university education ; 
the respect for education has deepened into a 
faith so intense that it has become almost a 
superstition, and both public and private 
funds flow with a kind of tidal movement to 
the support of education and the enrichment 
of its institutions. 

Nevertheless, the man whose schooling, 
like Lincoln's, has been "less than a year" 
and who has never crossed the threshold of a 
university, has no more consciousness of in- 
feriority in the presence of the president of 
the oldest university than the lawyer has in 
the presence of the physician, or the architect 
in the presence of the engineer. He recog- 
nizes cordially that another is better equipped 
than he in a special kind of work, but as a 
man he has not the slightest sense of in- 
equality. He knows that the doors of op- 
portunity are open to him and that he can go 
as far as his ability and energy will carry him. 

16 



CLEARING THE WAY 

Americans believe profoundly in the system 
which rests the government on the broadest 
foundation of suffrage, which makes all men 
partners in the national enterprise, which 
exacts no special preparation of the man who 
takes part in public affairs, but holds the doors 
wide, so that a man may start at the bottom 
of the social order and go to the top. They 
believe in it, not because they think it has 
always secured for them the most economical 
or efficient government ; but because they 
believe it the most just and, in the long run, 
the safest form of political organization; 
and because they believe it gives the processes 
of government a fundamental educational 
value which has made the country a vast 
school for the education of people of all classes 
in that political character of which political 
institutions are the vital expression. For 
the strength of a people issues from the 
political character behind their institutions, 
and the institutions are real and vital only in 
so far as they express that character. This 
is what Hamilton, one of the four or five men 
who had most to do with framing the Ameri- 
c 17 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

can Constitution and creating its govern- 
ment, had in mind when he wrote: "The 
truth is that the general genius of a govern- 
ment is all that can be substantially relied 
upon for permanent effects. Particular pro- 
visions, though not altogether useless, have 
far less virtue and efficiency than are com- 
monly ascribed to them; and the want of 
them will never be, with men of sound dis- 
cernment, a decisive objection to any plan 
which exhibits the leading characters of a 
good government." 

This is not equivalent to saying that all 
forms of government have equal value ; it 
is equivalent to saying that a self-controlled 
and disciplined people will give a good ac- 
count of themselves in spite of defective 
political institutions. The general genius of 
a government is the genius of a people or- 
ganized into institutions and embodied in 
laws. The searching discipline which in the 
life of old Japan laid the foundations of 
modern Japan, and explains its efficiency, 
could not have been enforced if it had not 
conformed to the genius of the people. 

IS 



CLEARING THE WAY 

Americans believe that, under widely differ- 
ent conditions, they have developed the love 
of country and the desire to serve the nation 
with the fullest consecration of individual 
gifts, which give Japan organized strength 
and skill. 

But they are not blind to the perils of this 
system, nor are they unconscious of the diffi- 
culties which it presents to men of older com- 
munities who sincerely endeavor to under- 
stand it. Such observers find it difficult to 
believe that the order and self-control, which 
are the primary conditions of government, 
can be secured in communities in which in- 
dividuality has such freedom of expression 
and of action that it seems at times to obscure 
and threaten the very existence of the state. 
Above all, they are confused by the absence 
of authoritative sources of public opinion, 
by the diversity of sentiment on all manner 
of questions which affect the public wel- 
fare, which, at times, gives the country the 
appearance of a vast debating society in- 
stead of a stable, strongly organized com- 
munity. They hear a noisy confusion of 

19 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

sounds when they look for an authoritative 
expression of national judgment ; they find 
uneducated and unthinking people confi- 
dently and noisily asserting their represent- 
ative capacity as Americans; they find the 
American press conspicuously displaying the 
disorders of the country in headlines that 
seem by their very size to indicate the im- 
mense significance of the crimes, scandals 
and violations of law which they report. 
"Democracy," said Pasteur, "is that order 
in the state which permits each individual to 
put forth his utmost effort." The American 
believes so completely in this system, so far 
as his own country is concerned, that he is 
willing to accept the excesses of individuality 
which are inseparable from it. 

But he is not blind to the risks of mis- 
representation to which the country is ex- 
posed. He is not disturbed by these excesses 
because he sees them in perspective ; the 
foreign observer, unfortunately, sees them 
out of perspective. There are people of 
vulgar speech, manners and diess in every 
country; people of this type are no more 

20 



CLEARING THE WAY 

numerous in America than in other countries, 
and they have qualities which are often lack- 
ing in the vulgarians of other nationalities. 
They are usually disposed to be helpful and 
neighborly ; they feel themselves responsible 
for the comfort of women and the safety of 
children. But they have, as a rule, larger 
means than people of the same type in other 
countries, and they are more given to travel. 
They spend more lavishly than the same 
class in other countries, and they are more 
given to self-assertion. As a result they 
convey the impression that the vulgarian 
exists in far greater numbers in America than 
elsewhere. As a matter of fact, he does not ; 
but, lacking the repression which recognized 
authority, either legal or social, imposes upon 
people of his type under other systems, he 
is much more in evidence. His assumption 
of equality, which is a matter of course at 
home, often becomes aggressive and offen- 
sive abroad ; and his patriotism, which finds 
ready and normal expression in his own com- 
munity, is heightened abroad into a kind of 
flamboyant Americanism which is often a 

21 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

childish expression of love of country rather 
than an intention to affront the people whose 
guest he happens to be. Japan is the only 
country in the world in which politeness has 
been made part of the national discipline; 
in all other countries it is a matter of social 
tradition and standards, of family training or 
of individual instinct and cultivation. The 
American vulgarian traveling abroad is so 
vociferous that he multiplies himself; and 
becomes, to those who cannot see him in 
perspective, representative of a host of people 
in his own land, when, as a matter of fact, he 
stands for no larger minority than the vulga- 
rian in other countries. 

Americans have always traveled in large 
numbers, and Europe and the Far East have 
furnished the opportunities and the materials 
for a kind of popular university course for 
many whose means have outstripped their 
education, and the fact that they sometimes 
misrepresent the country from which they 
come is a small price to pay for the gains 
they make in knowledge and breadth of view 
through contact with other types of civiiiza- 

22 



CLEARING THE WAY 

tions and with the art and genius of the older 
world. 

In the open field of individual endeavor, 
training comes largely through practice, and 
Americans not only pay great sums of money 
for popular education, but make great sacri- 
fices of time, patience and of good repute 
among other nations by permitting prepara- 
tion for every kind of public work to be 
made in public rather than in the privacy of 
the schools. This is one of the most radical 
aspects of democracy and one which is most 
disconcerting to men bred under other sys- 
tems. To such men it seems incredible that 
a man without special training should reach 
the great position of the Presidency ; an 
office not only of great honor, but clothed 
with powers transcending those intrusted 
to heads of state in many less democratic 
governments. The question of the possi- 
bility of wisely directing the affairs of a vast 
community without technical training has 
been answered in America many times by the 
appearance in the forefront of public affairs 
of men of great capacity and dignity of 

23 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

character, who have shown special aptitude 
for dealing wisely and strongly with questions 
of national policy. As a matter of fact, none 
of these men of light and leading has lacked 
education for his work, but the education 
has not been academic. Lincoln had a prep- 
aration, that is to say, an education, for his 
immense responsibilities that could hardly 
have been more completely fitted to his needs 
if he had p ~>ed through every grade of school 
and college. Side by side with their passion- 
ate faith in formal education, Americans have 
a deep and unshakable faith in the educational 
influence of their ideals of life organized in 
their institutions, in the large liberty of action 
which they enjoy, in the inspiration of hope 
and the stimulation of individual initiative, 
which are in the air they breathe. Their 
system rests on faith in the capacity of men 
to govern themselves by intrusting them 
with full responsibility for the management 
of the greatest affairs of society ; and they 
believe that whatever mistakes may be made 
by the way, — and they have been many and 
serious, — the state gains in the long run the 

84 



CLEARING THE WAY 

service of men who have learned in the school 
of national life how, wisely and effectively, to 
give expression to that life. 

The standards of requirement for the pro- 
fessions and for all occupations in America 
are now practically what they are in older 
countries; the quality of the training in the 
American military and naval academies is 
well understood in Japan; the movement 
towards more exacting requirements in all 
departments of the government service goes 
steadily forward; nevertheless, it remains 
true that access to the public in America is 
open to every one who is sufficiently eager or 
ambitious to secure the means. The result 
is a large and often clamorous expression of 
ill-digested opinions, which range from the 
naive simplicity of childlike ignorance to the 
most fantastic radicalism. There is prob- 
ably no theory of religion, no conception of 
government, no ideal of social life, that has 
not been exploited in America ; and often 
by those whose perfectly obvious ignorance 
of elementary facts have shown them, at 
the very start, entirely without the capacity 

25 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

for public teaching. In Europe, as a rule, 
access to the public through books, magazines, 
addresses, sermons, pamphlets, is secured 
only by those who have some educational 
qualifications for the responsibility they have 
taken upon themselves. The views expressed 
may be subversive of every existing institu- 
tion, — for there is far more radicalism of 
a destructive kind in Europe than in the 
United States, — but the man who speaks 
or writes, as a rule, brings to his work some 
degree of intellectual preparation and com- 
mands, therefore, a certain degree of attention. 
\jG\ America, on the other hand, any man 
may w^ite or speak who can secure the use 
of a platform or command the services of a 
printer. There is, as a result, a vast amount 
of talking and of writing which is of no im- 
portance to any one but the speaker or writer, 
and which greatly confuses the observer who 
is trying to ascertain the drift of public opin- 
ion. In the great public school which the 
American community has become, the various 
grades make their recitations with equal 
emphasis, and the man of another country 

26 



CLEARING THE WAY 

finds it difficult to distinguish between those 
who are just beginning to learn the rudiments 
of knowledge and those who have become 
expert. In this respect America is a noisy 
and confusing country in which, at times, 
every one seems to be talking at once; and 
those who have the least claim on public 
attention are often the most vociferous. 

It happens, therefore, when an international 
question arises, that those who know least 
about it become voluble and clamorous and 
seem at the moment to express the convictions 
of a nation, when, as a matter of fact, their 
talk is like the foam on a sea which is restless 
only at its edges. In all countries there is a 
class of men who are made giddy by inter- 
national questions and rush into declamation 
before the country has begun to think. Of 
men of this temper in public life, America 
has perhaps more than its share, — though 
it must be remembered that the most thor- 
ough training often fails to put reason in 
command of emotion in moments of tense 
feeling; and these unseasoned talkers and 
writers sometimes assume to speak for the 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

nation when the nation does not give them a 
passing thought. America is often grossly 
misrepresented by these ardent but unintelli- 
gent orators, whose utterances are endured 
at home as part of the price of popular gov- 
ernment, but are taken abroad as serious 
expressions of national opinion. In spite of 
the ear-piercing noise of escaping steam, 
Americans believe in keeping the throttle 
valves open and enduring the discomfort for 
the sake of the safety. 

This same latitude of expression makes 
the American press a powerful organ of health- 
ful opinion on the one hand, and a serious 
menace to the higher life of the country on 
the other. Journalism is one of the latest 
occupations to secure the rank of a profession ; 
under the American system it is as great a 
necessity as the transcontinental railways. 
All public questions ultimately reach the 
people and are settled by them; they con- 
stitute, therefore, a great jury to whom, in 
all debated matters, the evidence must be 
submitted. The newspaper is the medium 
through which facts and arguments are pre- 

28 



CLEARING THE WAY 

sen ted to the jury. In many respects this 
duty — for such it is to a man who has any 
sense of responsibility for the use of a powerful 
instrument for good or evil — is discharged 
with ability and intelligence. For the news- 
paper has passed through the preliminary 
stage of purely individualistic enterprise and, 
in many cases, has taken on something ap- 
proaching institutional stability and con- 
tinuity. The age of the newspaper created 
and directed by one strong man of marked 
individuality w T ho made his journal a personal 
organ has passed ; a first-class newspaper of 
to-day is a highly organized enterprise con- 
ducted by a group of men, the majority of 
whom are often men of universit} 7 ^ training. 

But while journalism as a whole has passed 
through this evolution, a new and lower type 
of newspaper has come into existence, the 
special characteristic of which is the gathering 
of news of all sorts and kinds and its presen- 
tation in the most sensational form. The 
collection of news has been raised to the dig- 
nity of a science by the American press, in 
the service of which able men have shown the 

29 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

highest qualities of daring, devotion, self- 
denial, self-sacrifice and dauntless energy. 
In journals of the higher class, readers are 
kept in close touch with the current history 
of the world in all fields of endeavor; in 
journals of the lower class the emphasis is 
laid on whatever is sensational in eccentricity, 
criminality or social offensiveness. The com- 
petition for news is so keen that nothing es- 
capes to which any degree of interest attaches. 
Morning and evening, the entire continent is 
swept clean of every fact, rumor or report 
that can furnish material for a headline. 
No event is so local or so trivial as to escape 
the notice of these news scavengers ; for 
such this class of reporters are. No place, 
time or person is sacred to them ; no pity for 
sorrow, no regard for the innocent, no con- 
sideration for the unfortunate, no sense of 
justice, halts for a moment this relentless 
search for anything that can, by any heighten- 
ing or lowering of the lights, any perversion 
of facts, any use of insinuation or suggestion, 
gain a scandalous interest. I speak only of 
the sensational newspaper, but there are so 

30 



CLEARING THE WAY 

many newspapers of this type that they con- 
stitute a real menace to the higher life of the 
nation, and they must be taken into account 
in any attempt to understand the America of 
To-day. These journals have made the dis- 
covery that uneducated men and women 
are interested primarily in the personal as- 
pects of news, and their endeavor is to report 
news about persons with the ruthless detail 
of the most radical realist. And, in order to 
give it dramatic interest, they stop at no per- 
version or exaggeration. The foreign reader 
of American newspapers is appalled by the 
number and variety of legal, moral and social 
offenses reported — murders, outbreaks of 
mob violence, crimes against property and 
against the family, shameful, or, rather, 
shameless, divorces, eccentricities, vulgarities, 
frivolities so insignificant that they lie below 
the normal interest of a country journal. 
Such a reader wonders how a country so given 
over to crime and folly can live for a day and 
does not know that he is reading on one page 
all the crimes and peccadillos he would dis- 
cover if he read all the local journals in his 

31 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

own country. In some newspapers village 
gossip has assumed national proportions and 
importance. 

If the foreign observer is not to be as 
grossly misled with regard to moral and social 
conditions as he has been too often with re- 
gard to the attitude of Americans toward 
money, he must take into account the excess 
of publicity in America. It is not too much 
to say that there is five times as much pub- 
licity in America as in England, ten times as 
much as in Germany, twenty times as much 
as in Russia, and fifty times as much as in 
India. He must make large allowance also 
for perversions, exaggerations and inven- 
tions so ingenious, so daring and often so 
Original, that they reveal misdirected capacity 
for fiction writing. He must remember that 
in journals of the sensational kind the en- 
deavor is not to present facts, but to tell a 
thrilling or dramatic story. 

To understand Japan, an American must 
free his mind of many preconceptions; to 
understand America, the Japanese student 
must not only free his mind of his precon- 

32 



CLEARING THE WAY 

ceptions of political and social order, but must 
learn how little real importance in America 
many persons have who seem to speak with 
authority ; how misleading the utterances of 
public men often are unless one knows their 
character and standing; and how grossly 
many American newspapers misrepresent the 
spirit of the nation and the daily life of the 
people. 



33 



II 

DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

The fortunes of the Far West have been 
interwoven with those of the Far East from 
the first discoveries. The peoples who 
traveled farthest from the plains of Asia 
lost touch with those who stayed nearer the 
earliest home of the race, but were never 
wholly severed from them. The separation 
of the different races in Europe during the 
Middle Ages was almost as great as the sepa- 
ration between Europe and Asia. After the 
final collapse of the Roman Empire, which 
made way for the development of modern 
nationalities, war was the chief form of in- 
tercourse between the rising communities 
that were becoming nations. At the close 
of that period the two centuries in which the 
crusaders stirred the imagination of Europe 
and 'disturbed the peace of the nearer Orient 
renewed an acquaintance which had become 
fitful and occasional, spread curiosity about 

34 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

Oriental life, and made Europe aware of the 
art and luxury of the Far East. Trade be- 
tween the two sections began to grow ; for, 
while Europe had only metals, woolens and 
minerals to sell, it was an eager purchaser of 
spices, cinnamon, pepper, ginger, of precious 
stones from India and Persia, of pearls from 
Ceylon, of drugs, perfumes and sweet-smell- 
ing woods from Borneo and Sumatra, of 
glass from Damascus and Samarcand, of 
porcelain from China, of silk, satins, tapes- 
tries, rugs from Cashmere and from half a 
hundred ancient cities. Oriental merchants 
became familiar figures in the Mediterranean 
ports, and the traffic in fragrant and beautiful 
things not only grew into an organized com- 
merce, but gave the relations between East 
and West an element of romantic interest. 
Centuries later, when the ships built in the 
shipyards of New England made their long 
voyages to India and China, the boys who 
spent their half holidays on the old docks 
came to associate the Far East with the pene- 
trating fragrance which was wafted ashore 
from hidden cargoes. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

The commerce between Europe and Asia 
was in the last degree adventurous and peril- 
ous, but it developed into an extensive trade 
carried on along three routes. The southern- 
most, following the coast from Japan through 
the Malay Islands, touched at Ceylon, passed 
up the Arabian Sea and through the Persian 
Gulf to Persia ; or, crossing the Arabian Sea, 
reached Cairo and the Mediterranean by way 
of the Red Sea. This was an all-sea route, 
and, though beset with perils, was less dan- 
gerous and fatiguing than the more northern 
routes. Of these there were two. One 
started on the eastern coast of China, crossed 
that country to Turkestan, and, by means of 
a network of shorter routes, opened up the 
cities of Persia, of Palestine, of Asia Minor, 
and brought eastern Europe and western 
Asia into contact on the Bosporus and the 
Black Sea. The other and northernmost 
route started from Peking, crossed China on 
its northern boundaries, and by way of 
Kashgar, Bakhara and the shores of the Aral 
and Caspian seas, crossed the Volga and 
reached the Black Sea. These main lines of 

36 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

transportation were connected by short routes 
with the centers of European trade ; from 
the terminals on the Mediterranean goods 
from the Orient were carried by water to 
Pisa, Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Marseilles, 
London and other English ports, and to Bel- 
gium ; whence they were sent by land to 
Germany, France and the Netherlands. 

For many decades, by caravans of camels, 
on the backs of mules, or of stout carriers 
capable of almost incredible feats of strength 
in walking long distances with heavy loads, 
by seacraft and river boats of many shapes, 
the Far East traded with the West, and at the 
beginning of the fifteenth century European 
merchants had their quarters in many Eastern 
cities; and communication between East 
and West, though perilous, was well estab- 
lished and fairly regular. 

Then the Turks appeared on the scene, and 
the control of the Eastern Mediterranean 
passed into their hands. The fall of Con- 
stantinople in 1453 was followed by the con- 
quest of the territories held by Venice, of the 
islands of the Greek archipelago, of Lesbos 

37 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and Chios, long under the rule of Genoa. 
Turkish fleets preyed on trading ships along 
the Levant, while the northern routes were 
disturbed by recurring wars. For a time 
goods from Asia were sent through the ports 
on the Red Sea and through Syria, but early 
in the sixteenth century this great territory fell 
into Turkish hands. 

Few events have so rapidly made radical 
changes in the economic conditions of the 
world as the appearance of the Turks in 
Europe. The Italian cities, which had been 
the distributing centers of the old commerce, 
declined ; commercial supremacy passed from 
Venice to Amsterdam; trade between the 
East and the West was blocked, and the dis- 
covery of America became inevitable in the 
near future. 

Many influences were at work which would 
sooner or later have brought the New World 
above the western horizon, but the barriers 
between East and West made it necessary to 
establish new routes of communication. Eu- 
rope was rapidly increasing in wealth, the 
luxuries supplied by the East were increasingly 

38 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

valued ; and the love of beauty, stimulated 
by the Renaissance, craved the art of the 
East. To find a new passage to the Orient 
became the dream of the adventurous navi- 
gators of Italy, Portugal, Spain and Eng- 
land. Italian mathematicians' maps, charts, 
ships and sailors were ready, and when 
Italian commercial prosperity began to wane, 
Italian influence through the arts, through 
literature and science, rendered the world 
services of incalculable value. Italy played 
no such part in the actual discovery of America 
as Spain, Portugal, France and England; 
but she was the teacher of all these nations in 
the art of navigation, and she was the maker 
of their instruments. When the commerce of 
the East was taken out of her hands, she 
turned the mind of Europe westward and led 
the way to that enlargement of the world 
which has made East and West members of 
the community of nations. 

The fact that America was discovered in 
the endeavor to find a new way of getting to the 
East, and that the newest world was brought 
into view incidentally by men on their way 

39 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

to the oldest world, is a striking evidence of 
an interrelation of races which neither ig- 
norance nor selfishness can defeat; for the 
ends of the earth are bound together by con- 
ditions which have the force of laws of nature. 
When Columbus sailed from Palos in August, 
1492, his object was to reach the Indies ; 
and on his last voyage, six years later, he was 
under the illusion that the eastern coast of 
South America was the western coast of Asia. 
He died in ignorance of the fact that he had 
discovered a continent. When John Cabot 
was wrecked on the rocky shores of Labrador 
in 1496, he was on his way to Japan and the 
countries from which caravans brought goods 
to Alexandria ; and in taking formal possession 
of the country he believed that he was extend- 
ing the rule of the English king, Henry VII, into 
x\sia. Europe was obsessed, so to speak, with 
the conviction that there was a western passage 
to the East, and to the commercial necessity 
of such a passage was added the allurement of 
Eastern wealth and splendor in China, Japan 
and India, reported by Marco Polo and his 
brother, the daring Venetian travelers. 

40 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

Cipango, as Japan was known in those and 
later days, was described as abounding in 
"gold, pearls and precious stones," its "tem- 
ples and palaces covered with gold." Colum- 
bus called the inhabitants of the island in the 
group of the Bahamas on which he first 
landed, Indians, because he supposed he had 
found India; and he was convinced, first 
that Cuba, and later, Hayti, was the island 
of Cipango. So deeply rooted was the con- 
viction that Asia had been reached across the 
western sea that the great discoverers and 
explorers of Columbus' day never knew that 
they had enlarged the world by a hemisphere ; 
and Amerigo Vespucci died in ignorance of 
the fact that his name was to be added to 
the list of names of continents. 

It was not until 1541, half a century after 
the discovery, that the New World appeared 
on Mercator's map distinct and separate from 
Asia, and the first feeling which dominated 
Europe when the real significance of the dis- 
coveries in the West dawned on the Old 
World was poignant regret that the new 
lands interposed another obstacle between the 

41 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

West and the East. These facts are dramati- 
cally significant in these days when Japan 
and the United States have become neigh- 
bors, and the Pacific Ocean is likely to be- 
come as familiar a highway between nations 
as the Atlantic has long been. 

When the illusion that West was East 
and the New World part of the oldest world 
was dissipated, the mind of Europe was still 
under the spell of dreams of wealth to be 
found in the lands beyond seas. Stories of 
the treasures which the Spaniards had dis- 
covered in Mexico and Peru invested the 
entire Atlantic coast with irresistible in- 
terest for adventurers, gentlemen of fallen 
fortunes, and young men of restless ambition 
in England ; and the first English settle- 
ment in the country which is now the United 
States, at Jamestown, in Virginia, in 1607, was 
made by men who were in search of gold or of 
an open way to the Pacific Ocean. From these 
dreams the colonists awoke to the hard condi- 
tions of pioneers in a new world ; and, with the 
practical genius of their race, they began to raise 
tobacco ; they established local government ; 

44 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

they discovered the value of the negroes 
brought to them by a Dutch ship in 1619, 
and slave labor found its earliest lodgment in 
American soil. At the start the new coun- 
tries were a refuge from oppressive conditions 
in Europe, and the early colonies were pri- 
marily doors of escape from various forms of 
oppressive interference with religious faith, 
political conviction or individual activity. 

The triumph of the Puritan party in Eng- 
land and the establishment of the Common- 
wealth sent to Virginia, between 1640 and 
1660, a small army of men and women who 
were loyal to the monarchy, many of whom 
were of the Cavalier class. On the stones 
which mark the graves in the ancient church- 
yard in Williamsburgh, many old English 
titles are recorded. These emigrants had 
been landholders at home, and they became 
owners of great plantations in Virginia, and 
brought the habits of English country life 
into the wilderness. They were men of 
aristocratic temper ; they became masters of 
vast tracts of land cultivated by slave labor; 
they brought the Established Church of 

43 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

England with them, and made the parish the 
unit of local government. Men of this class, 
isolated from one another and managing 
large estates, developed unusual abilities as 
organizers and leaders, and when the colonists 
threw off allegiance to the British Crown, they 
furnished many of the foremost leaders of 
the movement. From this class came Wash- 
ington, Madison, Marshall. 

The second settlement of Englishmen in 
North America was made at Plymouth in 
1620 by the Pilgrims; the Puritans came 
eight years later and settled on the same coast 
fifty miles to the north. There were tempera- 
mental differences between these two groups 
of settlers of the New England colonists, but 
they shared certain fundamental convictions, 
they were impelled by the same motives, and 
were soon blended in a common endeavor to 
establish a new order of society in the New 
World. The withdrawal of the English 
Church from the communion of the Roman 
Catholic Church was partly political and 
partly religious. It was an assertion of the 
political as well as the religious independence 

44 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

of England from foreign authority. It be- 
gan with a denial of the supremacy of the 
Pope ; it ended with a rejection of his title 
to the headship of the Christian Church and 
the rejection of many of the doctrines, prac- 
tices and rites which had come into the 
Church since the establishment of the Papacy. 
But this reassertion of the authority of the 
English Church against the claims of the 
Church of Rome did not end with the re- 
covery of religious independence ; it became 
a powerful movement for the liberation of the 
English mind. It did not stop short of a 
searching inquiry into the nature of authority 
in matters of religious belief, into the sound- 
ness of the statements of faith, into the forms 
of worship. 

The decrees of the councils of the church, 
long accepted without question, and the for- 
mularies of theology which had become, not 
statements of faith, but its foundations, were 
subjected to free and rigid scrutiny. A 
marvelously fresh and inspiring translation 
of the Bible put into the hands of the Eng- 
lish people the text of a book of which they 

45 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

had received only authoritative interpreta- 
tions, and they were in a position to ask and 
answer for themselves questions which went 
to the very foundations of the claims of ec- 
clesiastical authority and of the creeds. The 
Bible had, moreover, this great and distin- 
guishing quality among books which claim 
to be revelations of the Divine nature : it 
was not a body of principles, maxims and 
regulations ; it was a revelation in terms of 
history ; it was not a philosophical solution 
of the problems of life, but a disclosure of the 
nature of the power behind the universe as 
that nature was expressed in the experience 
of the race. It affirmed the authority of 
certain moral laws, and it showed how those 
laws had been enforced in the experience of 
many hundred years. And this story of the 
Divine unveiling itself in the souls of men 
and in the events of history culminated in 
the biography of a Teacher whose supreme 
power resided neither in maxims nor in deeds, 
but in a nature of such divine purity and of such 
love for, and sympathy with, humanity that 
He spoke with the authority of the truth itself. 

46 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

This noble literature — sixty-six books of 
history, biography, prophecy, poetry, mora) 
teaching, religious aspiration, bound between 
the covers of a single volume — spoke to the 
awakened mind and heart of the English, not 
only with the authority of religion, but with 
the power of great literature. The liberating 
energy of a book charged with vitality went 
out of it into the imagination and conscience, 
and it became and remains the most powerful 
influence in the civilization of the English 
speaking peoples. 

The separation of the English from the 
Roman Church was inevitably followed by a 
sharp division of parties within the English 
Church. There were those who held that 
the supremacy of the Pope having been re- 
jected, the traditions, the practices and the 
faith of the Roman Church should be pre- 
served ; and there were those who insisted on 
a radical revision of doctrine and of ritual, 
and that the simplicity of the apostolic age 
should be restored. The mind of the nation 
was deeply stirred; debate grew more acri- 
monious; differences of point of view became 

47 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

more radical; the attempt to compel uni- 
formity of worship failed; the Protestant 
party became more aggressive; oppressive 
measures were adopted with the usual re- 
sults. As time went on, the differences be- 
came irreconcilable. 

The Puritans, as the radical reformers 
came to be called, protested not only against 
the mass and the authority of the priest, but 
against vestments, ritual, written prayers, 
altars, saints' days, the observance of Christ- 
mas. It was a struggle to the death, for the 
idea of religious toleration did not occur to 
either party ; the alternative to establish- 
ment of one's convictions was their total 
abandonment. The declaration of national 
independence in religion ended in the banish- 
ment or withdrawal of a large number of 
Puritans, the civil war and the downfall of 
the Stuart dynasty, the founding of powerful 
colonies beyond the sea, and contributed 
largely to the impulses which brought on the 
American Revolution. 

Puritanism went far before it exhausted 
itself. It set itself against all authority in 

48 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

religion except the Bible interpreted by the 
individual conscience, against the conception 
of the Church as having any authority beyond 
that of voluntary organization, against the 
priest as clothed with any greater power 
than that of a religious teacher specially set 
apart to the work of teaching. It revolted 
against forms of all kinds, although it in- 
evitably developed a form of its own; it 
rejected art and laid its ban on beauty; and 
it finally attempted to organize a society on a 
religious basis, in which only people who 
subscribed to the Puritan creed could exer- 
cise the rights of citizenship. It became in 
the end the most radical expression of ex- 
treme individualism. 

But with many limitations of vision and 
much hardness of heart it had deep sources of 
strength. It insisted on purity of life and 
laid unescapable and invigorating emphasis 
on character; it asserted the supremacy of 
the law in private and public life; it taught 
the reality of a man's direct responsibility 
to God and the authority of the individual 
conscience; it held education in great re- 
h 49 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

spect, and many of its leaders were men of 
university training ; it made the Bible the 
textbook of English civilization ; it made 
men strong because they believed the divine 
power was behind them; self-denying and 
indifferent to hardship because they believed 
in the supreme value of things of the spirit. 
It made them sober in life, tireless in industry, 
and of a sturdy independence of spirit. Not- 
withstanding its narrowness and intolerance 
in religion and its rigidity of life, the spirit of 
Puritanism was the spirit of freedom, and 
both in England and in America it was a 
mighty force, in the struggle for liberty. No 
study of American society is intelligent with- 
out some understanding of the Puritan move- 
ment and spirit. As the head of one of the 
foremost American universities, Dr. Nicholas 
Murray Butler, has said: "Puritanism built 
New England, and for nearly a hundred years 
New England powerfully influenced the 
United States. . . . The fact must not be 
overlooked that New England Puritanism, 
built on the rock of Geneva, is the secure 
theological and philosophical foundation on 

60 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

which all that is distinctive in American life 
and culture has been built. . . . This fact 
explains much of the narrowness and lack of 
sympathy with strange customs and views 
which one observes among Americans, and ii 
explains also much of the determination and 
energy of the American temperament. De- 
votion to duty for its own sake, and a deter- 
mination to persevere to the end in any 
undertaking simply because it has been under- 
taken, are almost universal American appli- 
cations of Calvinism." 

The Pilgrims, driven into exile, found a 
refuge in Holland; a little country with a 
passion for liberty, and hospitable to men who 
were persecuted for their religious opinions. 
The struggle through which the Dutch had 
passed in defense of their country and of 
their faith had not only developed a splendid 
vigor of character in them, but had given 
them a sense of leadership in the fight for 
religious freedom in which western Europe 
was deeply concerned. 

The Dutch were also daring adventurers, 
traders and far-seeing merchants, and it fell 

£] 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

to them to found the commercial metropolis 
of the New World and to make a notable 
contribution to its citizenship and ideals. 
In 1609, two years after the founding of the 
Virginia colony, Henry Hudson, an English- 
man in the service of the Dutch East India 
Company, who had made two attempts to 
reach Asia by the way of the Polar Sea, 
sailed up the river which now bears his name 
in the endeavor to find the elusive Northwest 
Passage, and was disappointed to discover 
that it was not a waterway to the Far East. 
Fourteen years later, in 1623, a Dutch colony 
was planted on the island which has long been 
known as the city of New York. The colo- 
nists were sturdy men, with a genius for 
trade; they bought the island from the 
Indians for about one hundred and twenty- 
five dollars, and were soon engaged in a 
profitable business in buying furs and selling 
them in Europe. The great trading companies 
which not only broadened the area of com- 
merce in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
but were intrusted with governmental powers, 
had much to do with the early settlement of 

52 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

America, and were especially influential in 
the Dutch colonies on the Hudson River. 
A monopoly of trade in these colonies was 
granted to the New Netherland Company, 
which was speedily succeeded by the much 
more ambitious West India Company, which 
was clothed with almost sovereign powers. 
It named all the public officers and could re- 
move them, administered justice, built forts, 
made treaties, and was required to build and 
keep a small fleet of war vessels in commission. 
England and Holland had a common foe 
during the early period of exploration and 
colonization. Both had gone through life- 
and-death struggles with Spain ; which, until 
her defeat by the two rising Protestant 
nations, had been the foremost Power in 
Europe. The enormous revenues which Spain 
received from her colonies in Central and 
South America had supplied her with means 
to carry on the struggle against England and 
Holland, and after her efforts to subjugate 
both countries had been defeated, the war was 
transferred to the other side of the Atlantic 
and became a struggle for supremacy in the 

53 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

New World. The founding of colonies was 
therefore, so far as these governments were 
concerned, not only a commercial enterprise, 
but a war measure. It is interesting to re- 
member that the fight to keep the control of 
the New World out of Spanish hands, begun 
in the sixteenth century, did not reach its ulti- 
mate conclusion until the retirement of the 
Spanish from Cuba in 1898. 

A fort was constructed on the water front 
of the island of Manhattan, a modification of 
the Indian name, a row of log houses built, 
and two hundred immigrants became the fore- 
runners of the Greater New York of to-day, 
with a population of over four millions. Trade 
prospered, great estates were created under a 
system of landholding which was essentially 
feudal ; but the political affairs of the colony 
were not well managed, and in 1664 it passed 
under English control. 

One of the main streams of French immigra- 
tion reached New York and contributed very 
attractive qualities to its social life. The 
Huguenots, the Protestants of France, al- 
though sorely persecuted and finally exiled, 

£4 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

did not lose those qualities which have de- 
veloped in France what Matthew Arnold 
happily called "the power of social life.' 5 
They were men and women of deep-seated con- 
viction and dauntless courage, but they never 
lost their aptitude for the amenities of life. 

The Pennsylvania colony, which was neigh- 
bor on the south to the Dutch colony, was 
founded in 1682 by William Penn and the group 
of people who called themselves Friends, and 
were called derisively Quakers. Their char- 
acteristics were simplicity of dress and speech, 
absolute toleration of opinion, and faith in the 
equality of all men and women before the law. 
The root both of their faith and practice was 
the belief that in every human soul the Divine 
Spirit is present and gives direct inspiration 
and guidance. This illumination they called 
the Inner Light. They were persecuted both 
in England and in New England, and in weak 
or unbalanced minds their faith naturally 
took radical and sometimes fantastic forms of 
expression ; but they were a high-minded 
people, who hated war and slavery. Their 
leader was one of the most influential men in 

55 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the early history of the country, and the city 
which bears his name was one of the centers 
of intellectual and educational influence from 
the beginning. The government was pater- 
nal, peace was made and kept with the In- 
dians, and the proprietary system with Penn 
as lord proprietor worked well throughout the 
colonial period. The liberal policy of Penn 
secured a rapid increase in the number of 
colonists, and attracted not only people of 
English birth, but the vigorous and hardy 
Scotch-Irish, the Dutch, the French and the 
Swedes. 

Maryland, which lies next south of Penn- 
sylvania, was also organized under a pro- 
prietary government, — a form of government 
which survived from feudal times in England, 
under which the overlord was a kind of 
viceroy and was clothed with almost regal 
powers. In this way Maryland was ruled for 
sixty years by successive Lords Baltimore, 
who, although Roman Catholics, pursued a 
policy of such liberality that the colony was 
for a time the refuge of people of widely 
different creeds. It was, however, too early 

56 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

in the education of the colonists to maintain 
this large and wise freedom, and the later 
history of Maryland as a colony was marred 
by bitter strife for supremacy among the 
different faiths. 

To the south of Virginia lay the two Caro- 
linas. The first settlement made in North 
Carolina was by a company of Virginians ; a 
little later a group of English planters from 
the Barbadoes cast in their fortunes with 
the colony. A plan of government said to 
have been devised by the English philosopher, 
John Locke, was tried in North Carolina; 
but the settlers, who were of a vigorous, 
independent temper, refused to accept it, 
and it was abandoned. In later years the 
population contained large accessions of Ger- 
mans and Scotch-Irish. The conditions of 
life in the colony long remained those of the 
frontier; there were no cities; the farmers 
and woodmen who laid the foundations of 
the future towns were men of great independ- 
ence of spirit, impatient of restraint, lovers of 
the wilderness; a hardy, manly people who 
hated taxes and desired only to be let alone. 

57 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

The early population of South Carolina 
was also English, but the revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 sent 
a large emigration of Huguenots to this 
colony ; a people of heroic temper, of whom it 
has been said that they "had the virtues of 
the English Puritans without their bigotry." 

Colonial history in America closed with the 
first movement of emigration from the sea- 
board at the close of the War for Independ- 
ence. The thirteen colonies which faced the 
Atlantic from New England to the Carolinas 
were settled by men of English, Dutch, 
French, blood; with a mixture of Scotch- 
Irish, German and Swedish blood, — vigorous 
races who sent their most vigorous, independ- 
ent and adventurous representatives to face 
the perils and master the difficulties of the 
exploration and settlement of a new world. 
They were drawn to that world by three or 
four of the major motives which stir men to 
undertake new enterprises and to risk the 
"hazards of new fortune." The earliest dis- 
coverers were one and all seekers after a 
westward way to the Far East, and they died 

58 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 

in the belief that they had found the eastern 
shores of Asia. This misapprehension hung 
over the mind of Europe for several decades ; 
when it disappeared it was succeeded by other 
illusions, — that the seaboard rivers ran to 
the westward sea and so made navigation to 
India, Japan and China possible ; that the 
new countries were full of cities of vast 
wealth and the country of inexhaustible 
mines ; that there were streams in the Far 
West in which, if a man bathed, his vanished 
youth returned. 

These delusions were cherished chiefly by 
the Spanish explorers and settlers; the men 
and women who founded the English colonies 
had confused ideas of the conditions they 
were to face, but were urged on the quest by 
very different motives. The Puritans in New 
England, the Friends in Pennsylvania, the 
Catholics in Maryland, the Huguenots in 
New York and South Carolina, were exiles 
for conscience' sake, or were eager to prac- 
tice their faith under freer conditions. The 
Dutch came to New York to further their 
fortunes, as did many men in all the colonies. 

59 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

There were also ne'er-do-weels who had ex- 
hausted the patience of their friends at home 
and were sent to America with the hearty 
good wishes of those who were glad to be rid 
of them; and there were, as in all colonies, 
many restless and reckless spirits who hoped 
to find in the New World the freedom from 
restraint which the Old World imposed on 
them. 



60 



Ill 

POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

The thirteen English-speaking colonies in 
North America were, like Australia and New 
Zealand to-day, experiment stations in the 
science of government. They were ruled 
from a country three thousand miles distant 
in space and two months in time ; and, long 
after they had become independent, com- 
munication with England was tedious, un- 
certain and perilous. The people of the 
leading colonies, New England and Virginia, 
brought to the New World strong convictions 
with regard to freedom of opinion and con- 
duct ; their presence in the wilderness was a 
protest against existing conditions in Eng- 
land. They had no common theory of the 
way in which they should be ruled, but they 
had escaped from some form of oppression 
or of repression ; the foundations of their 
faith in the old order of things had been 

61 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

rudely shaken. They were shut off from 
those influences of daily association which are 
more powerful than law or force in keeping 
men together in political or social organiza- 
tion. They were fighting for existence with 
the consciousness, which deepened as time 
went on, that the home countries gave them 
little thought, and that their fortunes were in 
their own hands. 

The colonists had also a keen sense of their 
own importance ; they were aggressive in 
temper, or they would not have been pioneers ; 
they were building new communities under 
conditions which compelled them to act in- 
dependently, not only of the home govern- 
ment, but — for a time at least — of one 
another. They needed very skillful and sym- 
pathetic direction from London and, as a 
rule, they were under the management of 
men who had neither knowledge of the con- 
ditions nor that imagination which is one of 
the highest qualities of statesmanship. 

For this blindness the age was largely re- 
sponsible. The accepted idea of a colony 
was that it existed to enrich the home country ; 

62 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

that as little as possible was to be given to 
it and as much as possible taken out of it. 
The needs and feelings of the colonists were 
of no importance to the distant government. 
The policy of exploiting colonies for the 
benefit of the home country was axiomatic. 
In this way Spain dealt with all her colonies 
in the New World, taking from them vast 
revenues and governing them by royal favor- 
ites, soldiers of fortune, ruined noblemen 
and speculators. In this way France ruled 
her colonies in the north, treating the vast 
tracts of country out of which her brave ex- 
plorers and priests had created a new France 
as a pawn in the game of international di- 
plomacy. The policy of managing colonies 
in their own interests now pursued by Japan 
in Korea, by the United States in the Philip- 
pines, and by England in Egypt had not so 
much as dawned on the minds of the men who 
governed the English colonies in America. 

Nor had it occurred to them that colonial 
ministers and governors ought to be chosen 
for their ability and knowledge of conditions 
rather than for party services or as an 

63 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

expression of royal favor. The royal gov- 
ernors sent to Boston, New York, Jamestown, 
were, with some shining exceptions, men of 
stubborn will, dull imagination and a dis- 
position to magnify their offices. English- 
men had thoroughly learned the importance 
of keeping the control of revenues and ex- 
penditures in their own control, and the 
colonial legislatures kept salaries, taxes and 
supplies in their own hands ; a practice which 
set sharp limits to the powers of the royal 
governors, and kept both colonists and gov- 
ernors in a state of chronic irritation. The 
royal governors were dependent on the king, 
and the colonists were wise enough to keep a 
hold on them by control of the purse. 

As time went on the colonies increased in 
population and in self-confidence, and their 
commercial interests began to conflict with 
those of the mother country. They were 
fast getting out of tutelage and resented a 
policy which treated them simply as sources 
of wealth for Great Britain. At the very 
time when wise statesmanship was sorely 
needed, the management of America's affairs 

64 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

fell into the hands of a group of politicians as 
dull and provincial in imagination as they 
were corrupt in political morals. George III 
was a man of honest heart, of limited intelli- 
gence and of a stubborn will. He held a 
high view of his prerogatives, regarded him- 
self as the ruler of Great Britain, and, in work- 
ing out his theory of personal government, 
was surrounded by pliant ministers who were 
his servants rather than his advisers. It 
ought to be remembered that the king and 
his ministers were dealing with conditions 
which were new in English history, that there 
were no precedents to guide them, that the 
policy pursued in America was in entire har- 
mony with that pursued in England, and that, 
if foreign affairs had not forced themselves 
into the foreground, this policy would prob- 
ably, have led to popular resistance on the 
East as well as the West side of the Atlantic. 
The root of the differences between the 
colonists and the government of George III 
was the arbitrary imposition of financial 
burdens on the colonists, and the arbitrary 
restriction of their trade and industries. The 
f 65 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

colonists saw clearly that if the king secured 
control of their finances, their independence 
in the management of their internal affairs 
would be lost, and the fruits of the long 
struggle for liberty which had run parallel 
with English history would be sacrificed. It 
was not a struggle to save dollars and cents ; 
it was a struggle to preserve hard-won rights. 
It was not then, nor did it become after war 
broke out, a struggle between the colonists 
and the English people ; it was a fight between 
the colonists and the personal government 
of the king. There was widespread sym- 
pathy in England with the protests of the 
colonists; during the early years of the war, 
before France joined forces with the colonists, 
portraits of American generals hung in shop 
windows in English towns; and the most 
eloquent advocates of the rights of English- 
men beyond the sea were three or four great 
Englishmen in the House of Commons. The 
American Revolution was, in fact, a sequel to 
the English Revolution; an incident of tre- 
mendous and unexpected significance in the 
long fight for popular government in Eng- 

66 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

land ; and the colonists would have been 
satisfied with a moiety of the freedom which 
has knit Canada and Australia to the British 
Empire. 

The instinct of the king warned him that 
the contention of the colonists struck at the 
root of his un-English theory of government, 
and that if he conceded the soundness of the 
principle of "no taxation without represen- 
tation,' ' he would undermine the foundations 
of his power. He could carry on his policy of 
autocratic rule only by keeping a pliant 
majority in the House of Commons, and that 
majority depended on the command of elec- 
tions in the "rotten boroughs" which a hand- 
ful of voters represented in the Commons, 
while growing cities w T ere entirely without 
voice in the government of the nation. If 
the American principle had been applied in 
England, the king would have lost his power 
and Chatham might again have been prime 
minister and the ruler of the empire. 

The idea of separation from the mother 
country was in the minds of only a few far- 
seeing men when the struggle began, but it 

67 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

was the logical and inevitable outcome of that 
struggle. To the great majority of leaders 
permanent separation was both unwelcome 
and impracticable ; but as the war went on 
it became clear that the colonists must choose 
between subjugation and independence. 
Their condition in a struggle with a govern- 
ment of such resources as the British was 
desperate ; but they were fighting on their 
own ground ; they had able leaders and a 
man of great nature and great military skill 
at the head of their armies ; they were op- 
posed by a few generals of ability, but for 
the most part the British commanders were 
lacking in initiative, energy and flexibility. 
They underrated the fighting qualities of 
their opponents, and they obstinately refused 
to adapt their methods and tactics to the 
country in which they were an alien invading 
foe. 

The war ended with the surrender of the 
British army at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781, 
though a treaty of peace was not signed until 
two years later. The colonists had won their 
independence, but they owed ten million 

68 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

dollars to creditors in France, Holland and 
Spain; their debts to their own people were 
heavy ; business was prostrated ; there was 
no central authority to levy and collect taxes ; 
it was necessary to adopt new constitutions 
and organize new state governments. It was 
necessary, in a word, to reconstruct the local 
and state governments and to create some 
form of central government. During the 
eight years of war a Continental Congress, 
an emergency device, had supplied a central 
authority of a very ineffective and feeble 
kind. Articles of Confederation, also framed 
to meet an emergency, had denned the powers 
of this provisional body, which had performed 
some of the functions of government but was 
denied the exercise of essential governmental 
powers ; taxes and import duties were left 
in the hands of the individual states; no bill 
passed by the Congress could become a law 
unless confirmed by a two-thirds vote of the 
states. The central government had no power 
to coerce a state which refused to contribute 
its share toward meeting the expenses of 
carrying on the government ; and it had no 

69 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

authority to represent the colonies in their 
relations with other governments. When the 
treaty with England was signed, the thirteen 
states were named as the contracting powers 
on the American side. 

Those states were now independent, not 
only of Great Britain, of one another; they 
had stood together against a common foe, 
and when the danger which united them was 
past, they were held together loosely by their 
common needs, by their slowly acquired habit 
of acting together, and by their keen practical 
sense. 

The genius of Washington, which had guided 
the colonists through appalling difficulties, 
led them another step in this journey towards 
independence. When the army was dis- 
banded to become incorporated again into 
the citizenship of the country, as the great 
armies were received back into the vocations 
of peace at the end of the War between the 
States, he addressed a letter to the governors 
of the states pointing out the causes of the 
inefficiency of the general government during 
the war, and emphasizing the needs which 

70 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

must be met in organizing a permanent central 
authority. Such a government, he declared, 
must be based on an indissoluble union of the 
states; it must be empowered to lay and 
collect taxes and to provide for the payment 
of public debts ; it must have authorit} T to 
organize a system under which a citizen 
army should be at its command ; a militia 
which could be called upon to preserve order 
and to defend the country against invaders. 
Such a central government, he said, could be 
secured only by laying aside local prejudices, 
sectional jealousies and mutual suspicion, 
and meeting the crisis in a spirit of concession 
and of willingness to make sacrifices for the 
sake of the general safety. 

It was a crisis hardly less serious than that 
which had brought on the Revolution. The 
old colonies were thirteen small nations, 
largely ignorant of the temper and resources 
of one another ; jealous of their rights ; un- 
accustomed to any concerted action except 
that of defense. They were called upon to 
solve a problem which the Greek states with 
their immense intelligence did not succeed 

71 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

in solving: to preserve local autonomy and 
independence and yet act as a nation under a 
central government. To the solution of this 
problem they brought the habit of free dis- 
cussion of public affairs and of the manage- 
ment of local affairs, the political intelli- 
gence, and, above all, the political character, 
developed by centuries of Anglo-Saxon prac- 
tice of political activity ; and they had the 
wise and sober leadership of a group of states- 
men who would have made any age memora- 
ble. The discussion was long and engrossed 
the attention of the people of the colonies 
from the close of the war in 1783 to the 
adoption of the Constitution in 1789. There 
were many conflicting claims for territory 
to be adjusted ; and these were finally settled 
by an ordinance adopted in 17S7 ; the first 
exercise of national sovereignty by Congress 
with the assent of the people of all the states, 
and under the provisions of which five great 
states in what is now the Central West were 
added to the original thirteen. This united 
action was an object lesson of immense im- 
portance to a group of states which were in 

72 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

danger of drifting into anarchy, if not of civil 
war. 

In the Constitutional Convention which 
met later in the same year, there were fifty- 
five members, of whom thirty-two were men 
of college training, and many of these had 
been diligent students of the science of govern- 
ment. Four had conspicuously served the 
country and brought to the deliberations of 
the Convention wide experience, exact knowl- 
edge of existing conditions, and ardent de- 
votion to the interests of the new nation: 
Washington, the foremost leader in war and 
a man of great and solid qualities of judgment ; 
Benjamin Franklin, the personification, in 
his eighty-second year, of the practical sagac- 
ity and genius of the American; Madison, 
an expert in political knowledge, an ad- 
mirable debater, of a capacious and luminous 
intelligence; and Hamilton, the most bril- 
liant and fascinating figure of the Revolu- 
tionary period, who was later to develop an 
extraordinary and sorely needed genius for 
finance. 

After four months of earnest and often 
73 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

passionate discussion, the Convention pre- 
sented a draft of a proposed constitution to 
the country, and the discussion was trans- 
ferred from the Convention hall to the countrv 

*/ 

at large and finally adopted by all the states 
in 1789. 

Mr. James Bryce, whose "American Com- 
monwealth " holds the first place among text- 
books on the American political system, has 
said that "it ranks above every other written 
constitution for the intrinsic excellence of its 
scheme, its adaptation to the circumstances 
of the people, the simplicity, brevity and 
precision of its language, its judicious mixture 
of definiteness in principle with elasticity in 
detail." The wisdom of its framers was 
strikingly shown in making it a statement of 
principles and not a body of regulations. 
This feature has made it a vital and adapta- 
ble rule of political action instead of a mass 
of regulations which, in the nature of things, 
must always be largely temporary in their 
application. It has been the chief function 
of the Supreme Court which it created, to 
interpret its provisions and to apply them to 

74 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

changing conditions. The seventeen amend- 
ments which have been adopted since 1789 
have supplemented rather than modified it. 

This constitution offered a solution of the 
problem of combining local self-government 
with strong, effective central government, 
which may be regarded as the most important 
American contribution to the science of gov- 
ernment. It created a powerful nation, and 
it preserved local autonomy ; it combined 
the New England town meeting, the most 
elementary and radical form of democracy, 
with an effective national authority. The 
Greeks failed to take the step which might 
have preserved the practical independence 
of their brilliant cities without laying the 
country open to the foes who eventually 
destroyed her. The American colonies kept 
their autonomy and merged themselves in a 
nation by creating a permanent federation 
on a basis of local representation. They sub- 
stituted for the earlier processes of absorp- 
tion, or aggregation by conquest, unity of 
action through a representative government. 

"Complete independence in local affairs," 
75 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

writes the author of "American Political 
Ideas," "when combined with adequate rep- 
resentation in the Federal council, has ef- 
fected such a cohesion of interests through- 
out the nation as no central government, 
however cunningly devised, could ever have 
secured." 

Under this system a government framed 
to conduct the affairs of four millions of 
people living along the Atlantic seaboard is 
managing the affairs of nearly one hundred 
million people and of a territory of continental 
magnitude. There is an undefined border- 
land, a "twilight zone," between the State 
and the nation, and there has always been 
and probably always will be, a broad differ- 
ence of opinion respecting the division of 
powers between the States and the nation. 
The question of sovereignty was settled by a 
decisive war; the nation is supreme and the 
States constitute, not a group of independent 
sovereignties, but an indissoluble union in a 
nation. But the State lines remain intact: 
the affairs of each State are managed by that 
State without the interference of the Federal 

76 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

government. The wider action of the Fed- 
eral government in recent years has been due 
to the enormous increase of interstate activi- 
ties of all kinds, and has been necessitated 
by conditions with which the States are un- 
able to deal. 

The first election under the Constitution 
made Washington President of the United 
States, and the new government turned 
promptly to the many-sided and difficult work 
of organizing the machinery through which 
its policy could be carried out and its functions 
discharged. There were no precedents to 
guide the country, and there were wide differ- 
ences of opinion to adjust; the various de- 
partments had to be created and set in opera- 
tion ; a financial policy had to be formulated 
with the utmost dispatch, for the finances 
of the country were in a chaotic condition ; 
the Federal courts had to be constituted; 
and it was necessary to make a large number 
of appointments for important positions. 

The danger point in the situation was the 
state of the finances; and fortunately the 
nation had in its service a man of financial 

77 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

genius. Hamilton was only thirty-two years 
of age, but he brought to his task technical 
knowledge of a high order; and, above all, 
though a man of extraordinary brilliancy, 
he had a firm will, solid judgment and a gift 
for mastering details. With astonishing ra- 
pidity, in a series of reports and bills, he laid 
before Congress and the country a scheme 
for the creation of a national bank, a mint 
and a currency ; he funded the national and 
State debts, both foreign and domestic ; and 
he provided sufficient income by laying taxes 
on the manufacture of spirits and duties on 
imports. He proposed a plan for the foster- 
ing of manufactures by a system of duties 
which may be regarded as the origin of the 
protection system in the United States. For 
Hamilton had the imagination of a states- 
man as well as the practical sagacity of a 
financier ; he saw not only the need of putting 
the disordered finances of the nation on a 
sound basis, but of making provision for the 
development of its resources. Moreover, his 
plans had a political as well as a financial 
purpose; he aimed to create a group of men 

78 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

in all parts of the country who should be 
bound to the new government by their per- 
sonal interests. 

These radical and far-reaching measures at 
once brought out differences of opinion on 
fundamental constitutional questions, and 
these differences crystallized into the two 
theories which have divided Americans from 
the beginning of their history ; and which, 
like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, 
have kept and will keep a balance between 
the relative powers of the nation and of the 
states. 

The Federalists, under the leadership of 
Hamilton, held that the Constitution should 
be broadly interpreted and that the possession 
by the Federal government of such power as 
was necessary to make it effective and to 
secure the "general welfare" was implied. 
The Republicans, led by Jefferson, held to a 
strict construction of the Constitution and a 
sharp limitation of the powers and functions 
of the Federal government. 

Other issues have risen from time to time, 
and other parties have appeared in the field, 

79 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

but this fundamental issue has always been 
involved. The parties have, however, 
changed names. The Federal party was suc- 
ceeded by the Republican party, and that in 
turn may be succeeded by the Progressive 
party, which has declared for a still wider 
extension of the Federal power; the early 
Republicans have been succeeded by the 
Democrats, who have strenuously opposed 
such an extension of Federal authority. The 
tariff question, states' rights, secession or the 
right of a state to withdraw from the Union, 
the improvement of rivers and harbors, the 
building of canals, the reclamation and con- 
servation systems, the regulation of indus- 
tries by the national government, — these and 
many other questions of policy have all in- 
volved in one form or another the funda- 
mental issue of the relative powers of the 
nation and the States. 

Questions involving the interpretation of 
the Constitution were presented to the Su- 
preme Court of the United States almost as 
soon as the government was organized, and 
under the leadership of chief justice John 

80 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

Marshall, — a man of commanding legal 
ability and force of mind, — the early de- 
cisions followed the lines of broad construc- 
tion. With intervals of reaction the decisions 
of the court have consistently sustained the 
view of what have been called the "implied 
powers" of the Constitution, — the power to 
do whatever is necessary to make the Con- 
stitution effective, and to promote the wel- 
fare of the people who live under it. 

The new nation began its career with a 
population of about four millions, living 
chiefly in thirteen states ; it has now a pop- 
ulation approximating one hundred millions, 
living in forty-eight states. It also exercises 
sovereignty over the Hawaiian Islands, the 
Philippines and Porto Rico. This growth 
has carried the center of population from the 
Atlantic seaboard to a point in the Central 
West. 

The vast, and at that time unexplored, tract 
of country, west of the Mississippi River, 
had been claimed by early French explorers, 
who with incredible hardship and by an al- 
most incredible physical endurance, had 
q 81 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

passed up the valley of the St. Lawrence, 
crossed to the Great Lakes, traversed the 
vast stretch of prairie to the Mississippi 
River, and made the first voyages down that 
river through the heart of the continent to 
the Gulf of Mexico. There is no more in- 
spiring story of dauntless courage and heroic- 
endurance than the record of French ex- 
ploration in North America. This tract, of 
whose extent and resources all the countries 
interested in the settlement of the New World 
were ignorant, passed later under the control 
of Spain, and, still later, into the control of 
France. The Emperor Napoleon, engaged 
in a life-and-death struggle with England, and 
in great need of money, sold this territory 
to the United States in 1803 for fifteen million 
dollars; a purchase which doubled the area 
of the United States and put the nation in 
control of the waterway that made the sea 
accessible to tke remote parts of half the 
continent. 

This new territory was promptly explored, 
and the successful application of steam power 
to boats by Robert Fulton on the Hudson 

82 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

River made the Mississippi navigable at the 
psychological moment; as the invention of 
the cotton gin by Whitney, a New England 
schoolmaster, came into use at the hour 
when the South was ready for the enormous 
production of cotton which gave a decisive 
impulse to the industrial development of the 
country. 

At the close of the war for independence* 
the first great wave of emigration poured 
through the passes of the Alleghany Moun- 
tains and spread over the valley of the Ohio, 
and of the chief eastern tributaries of the 
Mississippi, and laid the foundations on which 
a group of the most influential states in the 
Union — Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, 
Iowa — were soon organized. The balance 
of political power passed, two generations 
later, into their hands. "The West," writes 
Mr. Bryce in the "American Commonwealth," 
"is the most American part of America." 
And the leading historian of the West has 
said that "the American spirit — the traits 
that have come to be recognized as the most 
characteristic — was developed in the new 

83 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

commonwealths that sprang into life beyond 
the seaboard. In these new western lands 
Americans achieved a boldness of conception 
of the country's destiny and democracy. 
The ideal of the West was its emphasis upon 
the worth and possibilities of the common 
man, its belief in the right of every man to 
rise to the full measure of his own nature 
under conditions of social mobility." 

The population of the Central West and 
of the Mississippi Valley increased with such 
rapidity that in a single generation the pop- 
ulation of one State in that section exceeded 
that of two of the oldest seaboard States. A 
vast tract of fertile country offered at nominal 
prices attracted enterprising, restless and dis- 
satisfied people from the older sections, and 
the new country was settled by men who 
brought with them love of religion and of 
education, and habits of clean moral life, but 
who were ready for political and economic 
experiments and disposed to create an order 
of society in which there should be the largest 
liberty for individual activity. 

As western Europe had, so to speak, pro- 
84 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

jected itself on America, so Eastern America 
projected itself on the West, and in each 
migration, the fundamental character re- 
maining substantially unchanged, there was 
a distinct adaptation to new conditions and a 
distinct detachment from the older social 
standards. Virginia projected itself into Ken- 
tucky, and New England into the Central 
West. In 1817 a traveler on the national 
road, the first attempt of the Federal govern- 
ment to provide means of communication 
between the old and the new parts of the 
country, declared that Old America seemed 
to be breaking up and moving westward, 
and graphically described the procession of 
wagons, families and domestic animals flow- 
ing like a tide toward the Mississippi Valley. 
This great company of people became liter- 
ally a floating population. Leaving the va- 
rious roads by which they had come into the 
new country, they were carried to many 
destinations by large and small boats of many 
kinds, and by rafts of logs or lumber. 

Arriving at his destination, the pioneer 
passed through the same stages through which 

85 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

his ancestor from Europe had passed. He 
cut the trees and made a place for a home; 
he cut rings around the trees near his home, 
stopped the flow of the sap, gathered and 
burned the withered branches and planted 
his first crop among the stumps; his neigh- 
bors helping him when the house was to be 
raised or the logs rolled together to be burned. 
He purchased one hundred and sixty acres of 
land for two dollars an acre, paid fifty cents 
an acre in money, and had three or four years 
in which to pay the balance. The earlier 
settlers were often men without means, who, 
under a credit system which was both public 
and private, cleared and stocked the land, 
built homes, and earned by the hardest kind 
of work and saved by the most self-denying 
economy the money necessary to pay the 
debts they had incurred. There have prob- 
ably never been such opportunities of creat- 
ing wealth by hard work offered men with- 
out means as were open then, and for many 
years later, under the homestead laws, which 
made it the duty of the Federal government 
to sell public lands of enormous area on such 

86 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

easy terms as enabled the settlers to pay for 
their lands out of the income yielded by the 
lands. 

The earliest settler was a backwoodsman, 
but he soon became or was followed by the 
pioneer farmer. The charred land became 
fertile, substantial houses took the place of 
log houses, sawmills were built, orchards 
planted, cattle multiplied, and little hamlets 
became villages, and villages grew into cities. 

The same process, with the modifications 
introduced by slavery, was repeated in what 
is sometimes called the Southern South, — 
the territory which borders on the Gulf of 
Mexico. The lower valley of the Mississippi 
was settled, not only by poor folk allured by 
the chances of fortune under easy conditions, 
but by prosperous planters, with trains of 
slaves, packs of hunting dogs, and the habits 
and comforts of plantation life. 

In 1830 there was a vast unoccupied country 
west of the Mississippi River. The prairies 
were a sea of flowers to the great plains 
whose aridity created what was called on the 
old maps The Great American Desert, now 

87 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

smiling with fertility as the result of irrigation. 
The plains ended at the foothills of the Rocky 
Mountains, and constituted a territory which 
now supplies wheat, corn and cattle for the 
consumption of a considerable part of the 
world. A large part of this territory was 
claimed by Spain, including what are now the 
states of Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado, 
Utah and Nevada. Fur traders had long 
found their way through the defiles of the 
mountains to the Pacific coast ; and trade 
with the Indians, started by the French, had 
been carried on in Indian villages and at 
trading posts on the Great Lakes and the 
upper Mississippi. Exploration went steadily 
forward, and half a dozen trails pierced the 
wilderness. Far-seeing men began to under- 
stand the enormous value of this territory to 
the nation, which had reached the Mississippi 
River. The Floridas had been purchased 
from Spain, and Louisiana from France; se- 
rious boundary disputes with Great Britain 
had been settled and had brought the Far 
Northwest under American control. Texas 
won its independence from Mexico and later 

88 



POSSESSING THE CONTINENT 

was admitted as a state ; a war with Mexico 
ended in a forced sale to the United States of 
a territory now divided into six states. Many 
Americans feel that this war, brought on as 
part of the policy of extending slavery, is 
the one war waged by the United States which 
was neither necessary nor just ; but a glance 
at the map will show that the territory for 
which the United States paid eighteen million 
dollars was an integral part of the national 
domain, and must have come sooner or later 
under the American flag. 

In 1848, the year in which peace was made 
with Mexico, gold was discovered in Cali- 
fornia, and at the end of twelve months there 
were a hundred thousand gold seekers on the 
ground ; hardy, adventurous or reckless men, 
who had come overland by the trails, across 
the Isthmus of Panama, or in sailing vessels 
around Cape Horn. 

x\t the close of the War between the States, 
the second great movement westward carried 
an active, eager population across the plains 
in long trains of prairie wagons, upon which 
from time to time the more warlike Indians 

89 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

made fierce attacks ; and during this period 
there were many serious outbreaks which re- 
quired the free use of considerable bodies of 
troops for the protection of immigrants. 
The latest chapter in the story of the futile 
attempt to keep the aggressive races out of a 
continent which had been the hunting ground 
of a few hundred thousand Indians was 
written in massacre and expulsion in the three 
decades which followed the close of the war; 
a struggle now happily ended by a just and 
generous policy toward the tribes, which still 
number in all probably two hundred thousand. 
Meantime frontier towns were becoming 
thriving cities, mining camps permanent 
settlements, and vast farms were raising 
wheat on an unprecedented scale in the 
Northwest. The first of the transcontinental 
railroads sent the prairie wagon to the mu- 
seum and the frontier to the Pacific coast. 
The task of settling the continent, begun at 
Jamestown on the Atlantic coast in 1607, was 
completed three centuries later on the Pacific 
coast; the development of the resources of 
the continent has as yet found no limit. 

90 



IV 

PROVINCIAL AMERICA IN LITERA- 
TURE 

Unlike other literatures, American litera- 
ture had no childhood ; no morning stories, 
so to speak ; no local myths, traditions, 
marvelous tales of the beginnings of things ; 
no songs of valor and adventure like the 
"Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Ro- 
land," the tale of Beowulf, the cycle of 
Arthurian legends. America is a new coun- 
try, but the Americans are an old people; 
they began the experiment of living together 
not quite three centuries ago, in a historical 
age, which had not laid all the old ghosts to 
rest nor discarded all the ancient superstitions, 
but which wrote diaries and statistical re- 
ports rather than tales of love and chivalry, 
and listened to sermons, theological discus- 
sions and parliamentary debates, rather than 
to fairy stories and legends of heroes and 

91 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

gods. Such stories in some form it would 
doubtless have created in spite of its heavy 
daily tasks, since the imagination never en- 
tirely resigns its activity to the reason or to 
the hands; but it already possessed them in 
two or three literatures. When the American 
colonists began to write poetry and essays 
they showed early familiarity with the brood 
of celestial beings who had flitted from one 
early literature to another and found shelter 
wherever men loved beauty or conceived of 
truth as a living thing and not an abstract 
proposition. They were acquainted with the 
gods and goddesses whose names starred Eng- 
lish or French poetry ; and, later, when the 
most pressing work of settlement had been 
done and there was more leisure, they made 
classical allusions with the ease of the old- 
time university-bred men. 

In the days when the little communities 
in the New World were in the most complete 
isolation, the children still heard the ballads 
which had formed a popular literature in 
English homes for many generations. 
"Chevy Chase," the most stirring of them all, 

92 






PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

which the chivalrous Sidney said moved him 
like a bugle call, was familiar to them. These 
old songs of the people were preserved and 
passed on, as the tide of settlement ad- 
vanced, by word of mouth, and suffered many 
changes in the process of migration. In the 
great mountain region which extends from 
North Carolina westward to Tennessee and 
Kentucky, and includes parts of seven states, 
a population of nearly two million people 
have been isolated, until within the present 
generation, from the country about them, by 
lack of physical means of communication. 
Among these mountain people the old ballads 
brought over from England in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries are recited with slight 
local adaptations, and words in use in England 
in Chaucer's time, and long since obsolete, are in 
common use. But in the face of great perils, 
and under the strain of great hardships, winged 
songs and tales of fantasy seemed like the 
toys of childhood. 

In New England the earliest Americans 
were absorbed in an attempt to establish 
what they believed to be the kingdom of 

93 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

righteousness in the world, and to save their 
souls by shaping human law in conformity 
with divine law ; in New York they were con- 
tent with the beauty and fertility of the new 
country to which they had come from Hol- 
land, and with moderate prosperity and a 
pleasant social life ; in Virginia vast tracts 
of fertile country, with access to fine rivers, 
made the rapid cultivation of great estates 
possible, and speedily developed a country 
life with many accessories of hospitality, sport 
and training in the management of large 
properties and the handling of large numbers 
of men. 

Many of the early settlers both North and 
South were men of education ; they brought 
with them memories of the colleges at Oxford 
and Cambridge, and the habits of reading 
men. There were collections of books in the 
homes of the colonists. William Brewster, 
one of the foremost men in the Plymouth 
Colony, was a man of gentle birth and breed- 
ing ; he was born in a great manor house ; 
he had been a student at Cambridge; he 
had held important positions at the Court of 

94 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

Queen Elizabeth, and lie left a collection of 
several hundred volumes ; a prominent mem- 
ber of the colony of Connecticut had a library 
of a thousand volumes, practically every 
volume of which must have been brought 
from Europe ; John Harvard made a bequest 
of three hundred books to the University 
which bears his name. But there was very 
little literature in the sense of belles-lettres 
in these New England collections ; they were 
largely made up of theological treatises and 
books on personal religion. 

In Virginia there was a larger representa- 
tion of the Greek and Latin classics and, 
later, of the standard English writers of the 
eighteenth century ; but serious books, devoid 
of literary quality but dealing at great length 
and in the most dogmatic spirit with the re- 
ligious interests and experiences of the times, 
greatly predominated. Calvin's "Institutes" 
might stand neighbor to Ovid's "Metamor- 
phoses" on the shelves, but was more likely 
to find itself between the "Practice of Piety" 
and "Christ's Combat with Satan." In a 
few houses Bacon's "Advancement of Learn- 

95 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

ing," Montaigne's "Essays" and Brown's 
"Religio Medici" were within reach. A copy 
of Macbeth was catalogued in Virginia 
in 1699, but no copy of Shakespeare's Plays 
is known to have existed in New England 
during the seventeenth century, nor was any 
reference made to him by an American writer 
during that century. 

The English language, which is now the 
vernacular of two nations of world-wide ac- 
tivities and is heard in all countries, was the 
speech of a people isolated, in large measure, 
from intimate European contact and in- 
fluence ; it had been used by the foremost 
modern poet, who died nine years after the 
first English settlement in America; but 
dialects were still spoken in its home, it was 
regarded by scholars as lacking dignity and 
precision, and Latin was still the language of 
scholarship. This language went to America 
with the earliest settlers ; many of whom 
were, as in all migrations, people of great 
energy but of slight education. The splendid 
flowering of the literary genius of the English 
people in the seventeenth century might have 

96 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

taken place in Japan, so far as the American 
colonists were concerned. Many of the most 
intelligent among them would have regarded 
the plays of Shakespeare and his contempo- 
raries and the excursions of Edmund Spenser 
into fairyland as either frivolous or corrupting ; 
others were too sternly fighting against hun- 
ger and the Indians to find either interest or 
profit in imaginative writing. The voyage 
across the Atlantic was long and perilous; 
ships were few ; and the ocean was a barrier 
between the old and the new worlds which 
made the isolation of the colonies almost 
complete. 

The colonists clung desperately to their 
language and made little attempt to adapt 
it to new conditions. They called a half- 
naked Indian ruler of a little company of 
painted savages, in a little village of wig- 
wams which could be moved in a night, a 
king or an emperor, and an untutored Indian 
girl, in the scantiest garb and without posses- 
sions of any kind, a princess. They gave the 
birds which sang around their little communi- 
ties the names of the birds that sang in Eng- 
h 97 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

lish lanes and meadows ; and for several 
generations American poetry was full of 
allusions to nightingales ; and the "robin red- 
breast," the familiar companion of the hum- 
blest English homes, gave his name to an 
American thrush of entirely different shape 
and coloring. Later, when they acquired 
the sense of ownership, they became more 
inventive. They borrowed from the Indians 
such words as "sachem," "wigwam," 
"potato"; and they gave the birds descrip- 
tive names — the bluebird, the mocking 
bird, the catbird, the humming bird. In 
the widely separated colonies, as in the prov- 
inces in older countries, marked differences 
of idiom and pronunciation developed and 
have persisted in modified form to this day ; 
so that it is not difficult for a trained ear to 
detect the accent of localities in the speech of 
[rangers. As a matter of fact, many of 
those phrases which are broadly described as 
Americanisms are survivals of old English 
idioms fallen into disuse in the mother coun- 
try, but remembered by her children beyond 
seas. Popular phrases, and especially those 

98 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

compact deposits of experience and obser- 
vations which we call proverbs, in which 
Japan is so rich, were carried across the 
Atlantic by the earliest settlers and started on 
a new career on that advancing frontier of 
civilization which was to move westward for 
almost three centuries and to produce pictur- 
esque phrases and picturesque characters in 
prodigal profusion. 

The intellectual situation in the colonies 
for a full century after the settlements at 
Jamestown in 1607 and in Plymouth Bay in 
1620 may be briefly stated : communities of 
men and women from England, France and 
Holland whose exceptional independence, 
energy and self-reliance gave them certain 
formative characteristics in common were 
scattered along the Atlantic seaboard over a 
territory fifteen hundred miles long; these 
communities were fed from time to time by 
other colonists of a kindred temper; they 
were making homes for themselves in a coun- 
try of whose climate and resources they were 
ignorant; they were surrounded by alert, 
cunning and revengeful foes ; they were com- 

99 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

pel led to build their government and civiliza- 
tion from the foundations. A vast majority 
of these colonists spoke the English of the 
seventeenth century, and a small minority ac- 
quired it by force of circumstances ; a small 
number of men of education and of women of 
high breeding were in every colony, but the 
population was made up largely of people of 
small means and meager opportunities. They 
v/ere isolated from the intellectual move- 
ments and interests of the Old World, and en- 
grossed in practical work which could be 
neither evaded nor postponed. 

These people, full of the energy, independ- 
ence and daring which had separated them 
from their fellows in the Old World and in- 
spired them to take "the hazards of new for- 
tune" in the wilderness, were not without 
records of their faith, of their history, of their 
race experiences. They came from races 
which had already used in a great way that 
form of expression which we call literature. 
Separated, as they were, from Europe in one 
of its most brilliant periods of literary ex- 
pression, they brought with them a heritage 
: 100 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

of great memories, of heroic histories, of those 
creations of the imagination which reveal the 
genius of a race; they were inspired by re- 
ligious or political convictions deep and vital 
enough to send them in voluntary exile; or 
they were driven by the love of adventure to 
brave all manner of perils on an unexplored 
continent. They were not, therefore, a com- 
pany of materialists bent on trade or plunder, 
who found in trade or conquest an adequate 
expression of this spirit. For the most part 
they were men and women of exceptional 
energy, and the spiritual qualities they 
brought with them had already found expres- 
sion in literature as well as in action. 

Moreover, they had one classic of the 
greatest vitalizing power with them. The 
sixty-six books of history, prophecy, lyric 
poetry, symbolic fiction, narrative and biog- 
raphy which are bound together in the Eng- 
lish Bible had been translated with wonderful 
skill at the very moment when the English 
language was a fountain of fresh and vital 
speech, and had passed into the hands of the 
English people. Published four years after 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the founding of Jamestown, this body of lit- 
erature which English-speaking peoples call 
"The Book," passed into the hands of people 
to whom no other book had reached, became 
so embodied in the English language that it 
seems an integral part of that language, and 
was so thoroughly absorbed by the people as 
a whole that it has largely shaped ethical, 
political and social organizations and life 
wherever the English language is spoken. 

The air of the age stimulated both the 
imagination and the passion for action ; men 
were full of eager curiosity about the Far 
East and the Far West ; but the West was so 
new and so strange they saw in it the old 
dreams of youth and wealth come true. 
They had been so intent on discovering new 
highways to the East that for many years 
their chief interest was not in exploring the 
new land in the Far West, but in finding the 
water courses through it which would fur- 
nish channels for their ships ; and when, after 
many expeditions, they were forced to recog- 
nize the fact that they had uncovered, not an 
island, but a continent, they regarded it chiefly 
"102 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

as an obstacle to free intercourse with the 
East. To the dream of finding a westward 
passage to Japan and China succeeded the 
dream of discovering mines of inexhaustible 
wealth and fountains of youth in America. 
The sailors who went with the explorers 
brought back tales which, after the manner 
of sailors' tales, suffered a "sea-change into 
something rich and strange." The native 
women in the new countries were described 
as "wearing great plates of gold covering 
their whole bodies like armor," pearls were 
to be found in heaps in native houses, and 
in these houses there were columns of gold 
and silver. Every returning voyager was ex- 
pected to report something new and wonder- 
ful, and this expectation was rarely disap- 
pointed. In the sixteenth century the imagi- 
nation was as daring as the spirit of discovery. 
The contrast between the America of im- 
agination and the America of fact was tragic 
in its completeness. The earliest colonists 
were compelled to fight desperately to main- 
tain a foothold in the country. They were 
decimated by diseases which they did not 

103 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

know how to avoid or to treat ; they suffered 
from hunger, cold and heat; they were 
watched by relentless enemies ; they were 
neglected by those at home who ought to 
have succored them in distress and given 
them the moral support of sympathy. This 
failure was due, not to lack of right feeling, 
but to the disparity between great schemes 
and rudimentary organization. The colonists 
were practically thrown on their own re- 
sources ; a discipline which developed not 
only their capacity for taking care of them- 
selves, but their independence of the mother 
country. 

When people are building homes to shelter 
themselves from the elements, digging and 
planting to keep themselves from starvation, 
and cutting loopholes in their log houses and 
carrying guns to their work to protect them- 
selves from sudden attacks by Indians, they 
have little need of expression and less op- 
portunity to develop it. Their vitality went 
into their work and their imagination into 
their religion and into the further discovery 
of the world around them. The communities 

104 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

were separated by long stretches of unoc- 
cupied country, communication was slow and 
dangerous, and there was no common con- 
sciousness to express. Under such conditions 
the arts must wait on life, and in the New 
World life had many things to do before it 
could make time and room for art. 

The earliest books written in the colonies 
were, therefore, theological discussions, nar- 
ratives of religious experience and reports of 
the country. They were written for a pur- 
pose and were as free from the art of writing 
as the rude houses of the country folk were 
from the spirit of architecture. The first 
book written in that part of America which is 
now the United States was an account of 
adventures in Virginia by Captain John 
Smith, — a man of great courage and ability 
and of a bold and highly inventive imagina- 
tion, whose habit of boasting has discredited 
his really great services to the colonists at 
Jamestown. As the redoubtable Captain 
grew older in years, his adventures grew more 
wonderful in the telling, but his report of 
conditions in Virginia has historical value. 

105 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

At the end of a century and a half, common 
grievances against the mother country and 
common perils at home began to develop a 
consciousness of common interests in the 
different colonies. The intervening territory 
had been filling up with settlers, means of 
communication had become regular, there 
was much more regular intercourse, sug- 
gestions of cooperation between the colonies 
for defense were in the air, so to speak, and 
a plan for joint action, brought forward by 
Benjamin Franklin on the eve of what is 
known as the French and Indian War, was 
widely discussed. 

In that war, which established English 
rule in Canada, all North America was 
brought under English authority and the 
original colonists largely relieved of danger 
from Indians; several of the colonies cooper- 
ating in furnishing men and money. Fifteen 
years later they were to stand together in 
the attempt to establish their independence 
of the British government. In the mean- 
time they had begun to develop that con- 
sciousness of common need and experience 

106 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

which makes the subsoil of literature, and 
the first expression of this consciousness took 
the form of argument, discussion, satire. 
The War of the Revolution was preceded by 
a war of words. The grievances of the 
colonists, which had been many times laid 
before the authorities in England, found 
more emphatic and comprehensive statement. 
The colonists began to define their position 
for their own guidance and to make their 
appeal to the enlightened opinion of Europe. 
They examined the grounds of their protests 
more critically, strove to formulate the prin- 
ciples on which they rested their claims, and 
searched English history for precedents for 
their course. The discussion took a wide 
range and involved ultimately the funda- 
mental political principles which the English 
people had slowly worked out in their struggle 
for participation in government. Men of 
ability came to the front in several colonies. 
Samuel Adams, a man of great energy of 
character and style in the Massachusetts 
colony, wrote a stirring and strongly phrased 
defense of the rights of the colonists against 

107 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

arbitrary government by the group of irre- 
sponsible ministers who surrounded an honest 
but narrow-minded and obstinate king. As 
time went on, the feeling became passionate ; 
there was no thought of independence as yet, 
save among a few radical leaders, but there 
was a growing sense of injustice and a grow- 
ing determination to secure for Englishmen 
beyond the sea the rights enjoyed by English- 
men at home. 

Americans and Englishmen, looking back 
on that great debate and on the long struggle 
in which it ended, now see clearly that the 
American Revolution was part of the struggle 
for popular rights in England ; and not until 
other elements entered the field, notably the 
assistance of France, did the war become 
popular with the English people. For many 
years it was a conflict between the colonists 
and the group of incompetent or corrupt 
politicians who formed what was called the 
King's Party, and that conflict was waged 
as bitterly in the British Parliament as in 
English possessions in America. There was 
a flood of pamphlets in the colonies, and there 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

were great speeches in Parliament, where the 
case of the colonists was stated with noble 
eloquence by a group of the greatest states- 
men in English history, notably by Lord 
Chatham and Charles James Fox; men of 
the highest oratorical ability and of a lofty 
patriotism, whose fight for popular rights 
involved a courage and resolute persistence 
hardly paralleled by that of the colonists 
themselves. 

This discussion on both sides of the Atlantic 
rose to the dignity of literature ; and the work 
of John Adams, of James Otis, of Thomas 
Jefferson — of whom James Russell Lowell, 
the distinguished poet and critic, said that he 
doubted if America had produced a better 
thinker or writer — and of many other men, 
came to the front in this discussion, which not 
only produced the first writing of literary 
quality in America, but developed a sense of 
common danger and common conviction 
among the colonists and prepared the minds 
of men for united action when the crisis came. 
Deep feeling and passionate conviction gave 
these pamphlets and addresses and the 

109 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

speeches of men like Patrick Henry, the 
Virginian who struck off in the heat of ora- 
tory some phrases that became watchwords 
in the struggle, — "if this be treason, make 
the most of it," "as for me, give me liberty or 
give me death," — an eloquence which in- 
vested them with those qualities of beauty of 
phrase or of authority of thought which we 
associate with literature. Both discussions 
and speeches had immediate ends in view, 
but these ends were served by an appeal to 
principles so fundamental in the develop- 
ment of society that what was fashioned for 
the need of the moment took on the dignity 
and significance of things that endure for all 
time. 

At the end of the war the colonists found 
themselves facing perils almost as great as 
those through which they had passed. They 
had secured independence, but they were 
without a government. It was then that the 
long discipline and training of a people who 
had been in the habit of governing them- 
selves in local affairs showed their organizing 
power ; during the critical years between 1783 

110 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

and 1789 the colonies went on with their 
work and life by virtue of the political char- 
acter and habits of the people. The central 
authority, created by the temporary expe- 
dient of Articles of Confederation, was so de- 
void of power either of initiative or of regu- 
lation, that it maintained but a shadow of 
authority. There was no basis for general 
credit, no common currency, no uniformity 
of law; the colonies had still a very imper- 
fect knowledge of one another, their differ- 
ences of religious faith and practice and of 
social custom were many, there were bitter 
local jealousies and serious disputes with re- 
gard to boundaries. More immediately im- 
portant and perilous were the wide and deep 
differences of opinion as to what kind of 
government should be created : a govern- 
ment of restricted powers, which should deal 
with the general interests of the colonies under 
limitations so many and so great as to make 
it little more than an advisory body; or a 
government invested with power to make 
laws binding on all citizens and to enforce 
them. The fundamental question, the full 

111 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

scope of which only a few men saw at the 
time, was : shall there be confederation of 
sovereign states or a nation ? That question 
was not to be settled until after another long 
debate and another and more destructive war. 
The country became a vast debating society, 
and the Constitution which was finally framed 
was fashioned in the fire of that long and 
earnest discussion. The spectacle of a widely 
settled population, organized under fully 
developed local governments and of mature 
and strongly held political convictions, dis- 
cussing the nature and scope of the govern- 
ment under which they should live, was new 
in the history of the world and was the mental 
preparation for the making of a nation. In 
that discussion many of the ablest men in 
the country came to the front. Some of 
them, like Hamilton, had made reputations 
in military service; others, like Jefferson, 
showed themselves masters of the history 
and principles of government. Among those 
who advocated a strong central government, 
none was more influential than Alexander 
Hamilton, the most brilliant and engaging 

112 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

personality of the period, the intimate friend 
of Washington ; a man who showed, later, 
genius of a high order as a financier. His 
contributions to this momentous debate, with 
those of Madison, who became the fourth 
President of the United States, appeared in 
the newspapers of the day and probably 
exerted more influence on public opinion 
than any other statements of the case ; and 
The Federalist, the title of the volume in 
which they were subsequently issued, is one 
of the foremost American political classics. 
The leading spirit of the party which urged a 
government of rigidly restricted powers was 
Thomas Jefferson, the third President of 
the United States; a man of broad general 
education, of cultivated tastes and of radi- 
cally Democratic principles ; a student of 
French history and literature, sympathetic 
with the popular movement in that country. 
Jefferson was a man of vision rather than a 
practical statesman ; he was the founder of 
the University of Virginia, one of the fore- 
most institutions of the highest class in the 
country. He had great charm of manner, 

113 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

both in person and in speech ; and the name 
of no one of the founders of the government 
is more frequently heard than his in the 
political discussions of to-day. 

These two long discussions disseminated 
political ideas in all the colonies and formed 
in Americans that habit of political debate 
which very largely gives popular government 
its educational quality; and, while neither 
pamphlets nor speeches belong to belles- 
lettres, they expressed for the first time what 
was to become the national consciousness and 
are the earliest American writings of per- 
manent interest as literature. 

The United States created by the adoption 
of the Constitution in 1879 began its career 
with a population of about four million people, 
scattered through thirteen colonies. A nation 
had been called into existence, but in name 
only. There was a small group of men who 
distinctly foresaw the future development of 
the national idea and of the natural resources, 
but the vast majority of the subjects of the 
new government were still in what may be 
called the colonial condition of mind; they 

114 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

had severed political connections with the 
Old World, but they were still dependent on 
that world for literature, for art, for music, 
for social tradition, for fashions of dress. 
Their tastes and interests were provincial 
and were to remain provincial for a genera- 
tion. Save in the form of orations, political 
discussion and state papers, they were with- 
out a literature. They had, however, pro- 
duced two writers who were, to quote Matthew 
Arnold's happy phrase about Emerson, — 
"friends of the spirit." Jonathan Edwards, 
a preacher of terrifying power who turned 
the white flame of divine purity into a con- 
suming fire for the evil, was a man as un- 
like some of the doctrines he preached as the 
practices of some people who call themselves 
Christians is unlike the religion they profess. 
He was at heart a mystic, and, like all mystics, 
he lived in devout communion with spiritual 
thoughts and beings. In an age in which the 
sense of sin was abnormally developed, the 
sensitive imagination of this teacher of the 
immutable will of God as the supreme truth 
known to men pictured with startling vivid- 

115 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

ness the fate of those who refused to accept 
that will. His mind was, however, emi- 
nently philosophical and his "Freedom of the 
Will," written twenty years before the Revolu- 
tion, has been called "the one large contribu- 
tion which America has made to the deeper 
philosophic thought of the world." In grasp 
of thought and power of logic that statement 
still remains true, although America has since 
produced thinkers of greater subtlety and 
originality. 

Edwards was a man of the New England 
type ; ardently religious and as ardently con- 
vinced that the truth of religion could be finally 
and dogmatically stated in philosophic terms. 
John Woolman, on the other hand, was a man 
of the Middle Colonies, of humble origin and 
of slight education. He was a member of 
the Community of Friends, who had come 
into existence in England as a protest against 
what they called worldliness, who held that 
the human spirit is in communion with the 
divine spirit without the instrumentality of 
priests or temples or church organization. 
They listened for the Inner Voice which 

116 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

speaks in every man's soul ; they were mystics 
in religion and individualists in society. They 
dressed soberly, and were notable for honesty 
in their dealings, though by no means lacking 
in shrewdness ; they were simple in manner 
and speech ; and they held war in abhorrence. 
It was among them that the first organized 
opposition to the institution of slavery, then 
generally established in the colonies, had its 
rise. 

Of this company of unworldly people de- 
voted to the life of the spirit, John Woolman 
was a notable type. He was also an example 
of what the human spirit, purified and re- 
fined by unselfish love of men, can accom- 
plish. He was an illiterate tailor, but he 
wrote in a style of rare purity and grace; 
he hated slavery, but he loved the slave 
owner. He was studious by nature and gave 
his leisure hours to books ; and he was much 
given to long walks and to meditation. 
"I found it safest," he said, "for me to live 
in private and keep these things sealed up in 
my own breast." His "Journal," begun in 
his early maturity and continued until his 

117 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

death in 1772, is a record of his inner life, of 
his thoughts on slavery, and of his prophetic 
views of the labor question. It is in no sense 
a great piece of literature, but it has the 
quality of literature and has found very ap- 
preciative recognition among lovers of good 
writing in England. Franklin's "Auto- 
biography," although written in part before 
the Revolution, was not published until the 
year following the adoption of the Constitution. 
During the three or four decades that 
followed the winning of independence, two 
marked tendencies developed : a pronounced 
antagonism to everything English, and a 
pronounced admiration for everything Ameri- 
can. Patriotism was as much a matter of hat- 
ing as of loving. The hardships, perils and vic- 
tories of the Revolution were still fresh in the 
minds of the people, and the men who had en- 
dured and triumphed were still among them. 
Intercourse with the Old World was still slow, 
hazardous and expensive; the legacy of an- 
tagonism to England bequeathed by the 
Revolution had been augmented by unfor- 
tunate incidents of the second war with that 

118 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

country which began in 1812 ; there was a 
widespread habit of glorifying the men who 
had part in the first struggle. A popular 
mythology of heroic proportions sprang up, 
and men who had never been conspicuous to 
their comrades in the field took on heroic 
proportion in the piping times of peace, es- 
pecially if they happened to be candidates 
for public office. America was still provincial, 
although it was on the eve of becoming sec- 
tional. It was still isolated from the Old 
World, although it was on the eve of reknitting 
the broken ties of friendly intercourse and 
coming again into relations with it. 

It is an interesting and significant fact that 
this reestablishment of severed relations came 
largely through a group of men of letters and 
of scholars. There had been vigorous writing 
in America, but it had been so far the liter- 
ature of information, of theology, of politics. 
The literature of imagination, of humor, of 
sentiment, began in New York, the chief city 
of the most cosmopolitan of the old colonies 
now become States, and the future metropolis 
of the nation. It was then a pleasant city of 

119 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

about twenty-five thousand inhabitants. It 
lay between two rivers, and it had a spacious 
and beautiful harbor. One of these rivers, 
the Hudson, had not only great scenic, but, 
for its time, great historic, interest. The 
men and women who originally settled it 
came from Holland; they were followed in 
due time by a large migration from England ; 
and, still later, French Huguenots, expelled 
from their own country on account of their 
faith, came in large numbers and settled in 
New York and the country which lies east of 
it on Long Island Sound. Other races were 
represented in smaller groups, and when the 
colonies became a nation, eighteen or twenty 
languages were spoken in New York. Its 
citizenship was less distinct in type than that 
of New England or of the Southern Colonies. 
It was less serious in temper than the colonies 
to the east of it and more cosmopolitan than 
those to the south, which were largely agri- 
cultural in occupation. It was a commercial 
city, and, although it had suffered greatly 
during the war, it was not so sharply separated 
in feeling from the mother country. 

120 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

In this city which has always h - i gates 
wide open to the world, Washin^t j jl Irving 
was born in the year in which the British 
troops reembarked for England. He declined 
to go to college, read law and literature, and 
made his first visit to Europe in 1804. He 
was a born loiterer and observer, and he was 
the first American after the separation to see 
England with the old-time affection and 
under the spell of the old-time associations. 
Two years later he returned to his native city 
to join a group of high-spirited and vivacious 
young men of satirical temper in the writing 
of a series of witty comments on men and 
manners in the metropolis after the manner 
which Addison and Steele had made familiar 
in the Spectator. These papers revealed 
Irving's humor, his sentiment and his felicity 
of style. They were followed by the publica- 
tion of a book of unique quality in American 
writing, a "History of New York," broadly 
burlesquing the incidents of its early history, 
and the characters of its early men. The 
narrative had the manner of serious history, 
but it was a piece of good-natured but auda- 

121 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

cious fun-making. Published in 1809, it made 
a great sensation locally, but its readers did 
not know that it marked the beginning of 
American literature. It was the first book of 
quality and feeling written by an American. 
It reminded Walter Scott of Dean Swift, but 
Irving belonged to the school of Addison and 
Goldsmith. 

In 1815 he went to Europe a second time 
and did not return to New York until 1832; 
in the meantime he had written several 
volumes of essays and sketches, — a "Life of 
Columbus," charming studies of the Alham- 
bra, and the "Conquest of Granada." None 
of his books was of the first rank, but all had 
the quality of literature, and the dates of 
their appearance and their influence on Ameri- 
can Letters give them permanent importance. 
In two volumes of delightful sketches, "Brace- 
bridge Hall" and the "Sketch Book," Ameri- 
cans came again under the spell of things and 
places dear to their ancestors. Westminster 
Abbey rose before them again in all the 
majesty of its ancient architecture and of its 
august memories ; they heard again the peal- 

122 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

ing of bells from the venerable churches in 
which their ancestors had worshiped; they 
saw the home of Shakespeare; they enjoyed 
again the comforts of old inns and shared 
the hospitality of old homes. 

Under the spell of Irving's charming power 
of description, an England that had largely 
faded from the memory of men and women 
in the New World became once more the 
mother country of their language, their re- 
ligion, of their political ideals and social habits. 

Irving did more than this : in the "Legend 
of Sleepy Hollow" and in "Rip Van Winkle" 
he gave to Americans two characteristic 
legends; he prepared the way for American 
fiction ; and he furnished a convincing answer 
to Sidney Smith's question, "Who reads an 
American book?" For these books found 
many lovers in the Old World, and years 
afterwards Thackeray called Irving "The 
First Ambassador Whom the New World of 
Letters sent to the Old." 

This reknitting of the old ties was also one 
•f the services rendered by Longfellow, a 
man of the best New England stock and 

123 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

education, to whom the opportunity of travel 
and study in Europe came early ; who became 
an accomplished linguist and returned to 
teach the modern languages in Harvard Uni- 
versity and to become the most popular of 
American poets. He was of a gentle and 
lovable nature, of a quiet charm of personality. 
He was a scholar ripened into a man of culture 
by wide acquaintance with art in various 
forms. Longfellow's sensitive imagination 
and historic sense made him one of the earliest 
of the many pilgrims who have gone back 
from the New World to the places and build- 
ings associated with the earlier story of the 
races from which Americans are descended. 
His brother once said of him that the key to 
his character was sympathy. This quality, 
tempered by knowledge and reenforced by a 
pictorial imagination, made him an interpreter 
and a translator. He felt deeply the charm 
of ancient places, the fascination of old stories, 
the appeal of the self-denials, the romances 
and the heroisms of long ago; and in his verse 
Nuremberg, Prague, Salerno, Sicily, Switzer- 
land, serve as backgrounds for happily retold 

124 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

legend, history or romance. Through the 
temperament of this poet of the affections 
Europe became again to many estranged 
Americans an ancestral home rich in the treas- 
ures of art and of memory. 

Longfellow also drew freely on the tradi- 
tions of his own country, and two of his most 
familiar narrative poems, "Evangeline," a 
story of the expulsion of the French from 
Acadia, in lower Canada, and their settle- 
ment in the extreme south, and "Hiawatha," 
an Indian legend of great beauty, have taken 
their places beside Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" 
and "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as the most 
original legends that have their roots in 
American soil. He was the poet of the 
domestic affections and of childhood, and 
many of his short pieces are known by the 
school children of America. He was a gentle 
moralist, and, although lacking the highest 
gifts of inspiration, he put a brave and gentle 
philosophy of life into a few poems which 
have become an informal creed of faith and 
endeavor among all classes of people. His 
translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" was 

125 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

a labor of love as well as scholarly rendering 
of notable fidelity to the condensed and 
closely knit style of the greatest literary work 
of the Middle Ages. Longfellow's ease in 
giving happy expression to the common hu- 
man experiences and aspiration has, since his 
death, somewhat obscured his real poetic 
gifts, and many critics have been content to 
give him place only among the popular poets ; 
but this will not be his final position. His 
ballads and many of his sonnets reveal a 
poetic talent of a high order. Nor will it be 
forgotten that he was one of the little group 
of writers and scholars who put an end to the 
provincial isolation of America and made 
Americans conscious of the wealth of their 
racial heritage and of their place in the un- 
broken development of civilization. 

In Longfellow's youth began that pilgrim- 
age of aspiring young men from the American 
colleges to the German universities which 
contributed largely to the restoration of what 
may be called the intellectual equilibrium 
between the Old and the New World, and 
which greatly affected the educational aims 



PROVINCIAL LITERATURE 

and methods in the American colleges. The 
return of ardent young scholars like Ban- 
croft, who wrote later the first authoritative 
history of the United States, and of Everett, 
the polished orator and publicist and president 
of Harvard College, marked the beginning 
also of the very definite influence of German 
thought and literature on American culture. 
With these young scholars and poets, Pro- 
vincial America passed into Sectional America. 



ir 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

In the year 1817, in the best-known Ameri- 
can periodical of the time, there appeared a 
poem by a young man who had been born 
among the New England hills and was then 
studying law. " Thanatopsis " was the first 
notable poem from an American hand, and 
its author, William Cullen Bryant, was the 
first man to strike a new note in its poetry, 
which until that time had been slight, grace- 
ful and imitative, or satirical in mood. The 
population had doubled since the colonists 
gained their independence, and seven million 
people now called themselves Americans; 
they had settled the Atlantic seaboard, or- 
ganized the country beyond the Alleghany 
Mountains into states or territories, acquired 
by purchase from France an immense section 
between the Mississippi River and the Rocky 
Mountains, maintained the national authority 
in the face of local insurrections and of threats 

128 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

of secession north and south, fought a second 
time with Great Britain, built roads and canals, 
and laid the foundations of a great manufac- 
turing prosperity. 

The Provincial Period was at an end ; the 
Sectional Period had begun. The country 
was in the condition of Italy in the early 
years of reunion, when men still called them- 
selves Piedmontese, Venetians, Romans, 
Sicilians, rather than Italians. In the United 
States men and women thought of themselves 
first as New Englanders, Virginians, South 
Carolinians. The state consciousness was 
sharply developed and keenly sensitive in 
all matters of local interest or dignity ; a 
national consciousness was yet to be born. 
The Northern States were rapidly developing 
manufacturing and demanded the protection 
of tariff legislation ; the Southern States were 
largely given to agriculture and were opposed 
to any restrictions of trade. In the North 
one State after another had abolished slavery ; 
in the South, where many men of great 
prominence foresaw inevitable trouble and the 
inevitable passing of the system, the economic 
* 129 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

needs of the new States on the Gulf of Mexico 
seemed to make slave labor a necessity. In 
the alignment of conviction on the funda- 
mental question of the relative powers of the 
States and of the Federal government the 
people of the Southern States largely held to 
the sovereignty of the States, while a majority 
of the people of the North held that sover- 
eignty resided in the nation. 

These differences were in part reflected in 
differences of social ideal and habit, and in 
part reenforced by these differences. The 
rigid rule of religious discipline in New Eng- 
land had been greatly relaxed and the attempt 
to establish a government along the lines of 
the Jewish theocracy abandoned ; but the 
Puritan emphasis on morals still held, and the 
widespread interest in religion was evidenced 
by the Unitarian protest against the Calvin- 
istic conception of the nature of deity and of 
humanity. The people were, as a rule, of 
sober temper; industry and frugality were 
characteristic of the section ; education was 
held in high regard, and was universal. The 
Middle Colonies were cosmopolitan in pop- 
ISO 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

illation, social life was freer, and there was 
little moral tension. English, French and 
Dutch, in New York, Swedes in New Jersey, 
Friends from England and Germans from the 
Rhine provinces in Pennsylvania, English- 
men of the Roman Catholic faith in Mary- 
land, fostered tolerance of opinion and ease of 
mood. Englishmen of the aristocratic type, 
living like great English landlords, in Vir- 
ginia ; the descendants of the French Prot- 
estants in South Carolina; men of Spanish 
and French blood in Louisiana, — presented a 
broad contrast to the New England temper- 
ament and habit. Life on the plantation 
was, in its best estate, patriarchical in spirit; 
work was done by slaves; the landowners 
were hospitable and generous, given to sport 
and out-of-door life. When the question of 
restricting or extending slavery began to be 
seriously discussed about the time of the ap- 
pearance of Irving and Bryant, there were 
distinct temperamental and political differ- 
ences between the North and the South. 

A great war was to be fought to the bitter 
end before a national literature could come 

131 



) 
AMERICAN IDEALS 

into existence. Literature is primarily an 
expression, and, while prophetic notes are 
always heard in it, it cannot travel far ahead 
of the consciousness of the race that produces 
it. It is touched with visions of the future, 
but it is conditioned largely on the expe- 
rience of the people who produce it. Pro- 
vincial America produced little literature be- 
cause, among other reasons, it had no expe- 
rience to express and interpret. Sectional 
America produced a literature which was 
largely sectional in experience and feeling 
because there were as yet only pools of com- 
mon consciousness, so to speak ; the con- 
sciousness which has the breadth and reach of 
the sea, and its universality, could come only 
when the people of the States became the 
people of a nation. 

This local consciousness first found expression 
in New York, where people had lived together 
long enough to have a store of common mem- 
ories, of common habits, and of common ideals 
and hopes. Irving happily expressed the com- 
munity feeling at the same time that he revived 
the sense of community with the Old World. 

132 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

American landscape painters were impressed 
at the beginning by the vastness of the New 
World landscapes, and many of the early 
canvases were on a great scale. Bryant, 
though of classical education and familiar 
with English poetry, saw that he was in a 
new world. It is often said that magnitude 
has no significance for art ; that quality alone 
counts. But we study a building not only 
with reference to its construction, but with 
reference to its situation ; we do not put a 
small picture in a large frame, nor do we place 
a small building at the focal point of a great 
landscape. Now, in America, magnitude did 
count and will always count ; to dismiss it 
as mere bigness — mass without organization 
— is a fatal blunder if one wishes to under- 
stand or to judge intelligently. For in Amer- 
ica bigness is not inert ; it is potential. 

Bryant saw that Nature in the New World 
is not on the scale of a county or of a prov- 
ince, but of a continent. Matthew Arnold 
said that the American landscape was not 
interesting. It was a judgment possible only 
to a man who held that in landscape a certain 

133 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

scale is absolute. But scale is relative; 
there is a scale for England and a scale for 
America; and each in its place is adequate 
and final. The American landscape does not 
lack beauty of detail ; but it is molded on a 
great scale. If the continent could be seen 
in one all-embracing vision, it would show a 
massive structural plan; lines that sweep 
over a thousand miles ; mountain ranges that 
run from the Arctic zone to the tropics; 
valleys cut by imperious rivers which, like 
the Colorado, flow a mile below the edges of 
what were its banks a million years ago; 
plains which, seen from the upper slopes of 
the hills, have the sweep of the sea, but with 
the wonder and mystery of sunlight modulated 
by vast distances; deserts stretching, shim- 
mering in fierce light, from horizon to horizon. 
On a landscape of such range, with diversities 
of feature as striking as its extent, scale is the 
first and most obvious element ; an element as 
susceptible of artistic treatment as the ex- 
quisite delicacy of miniature landscapes. 

Bryant's imagination was not facile, his 
command of verse forms was limited, but the 

1S4 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

majesty of an almost unsubdued continent 
gave him a sense of elemental things. Sim- 
plicity, vigor, love of untamed Nature, a 
primitive divination of the greatness of life in 
the companionship of Nature, give his work 
austere beauty. He knew Nature about his 
home as well, and his songs of flowers and 
birds are dear to Americans by reason of their 
beautiful rendering of things familiar to the 
eye, but full of mystery to the imagination. 
Like all the poets of his section, he could not 
escape the moral implications of life as the 
Puritan saw it, and the lines "To a Water- 
fowl," limned against the sky with something 
of the fidelity of a Japanese painter, became 
a parable of human destiny. 

In Bryant three or four notes are sounded 
which have never been silent in American 
poetry: love of Nature, love of country, 
love of liberty, love of home. A large body 
of American poetry of the Sectional Period is 
dear to children, not because it was written 
for them, but because it deals with childhood, 
with life in the home, with the sorrov/s and 
joys of the school, the fields, the shaded 

135 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

streets, the brooks and the woods. This is 
preeminently true of the verse of Whittier, 
the Quaker poet, whose "Snow Bound" 
is the idyl of the old-time life on the New 
England farm, and whose songs of religion 
are tender and trustful psalms of faith in the 
divine love and care. In American schools on 
certain days one will hear "Skipper Ireson's 
Ride," or Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," or 
Lowell's 'The First Snow," or Emerson's 
"Good-by, Proud World," or Dr. Holmes' 
"The Nautilus," or Bryant's "Death of the 
Flowers." Whittier was a farmer's son and 
knew the workers in the small New England 
towns. He was a poet of the people ; his hatred 
of slavery made him preeminently a poet of 
freedom, and his poems during the long debate 
which preceded the war and during the four 
terrible years of conflict were notable for their 
undismayed faith in the victory of freedom. 
The most accomplished New England writer 
and the most accomplished man of Letters 
whom America has so far produced, although 
a man of academic training and long academic 
association, was also a poet of democratic 

136 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

instinct and sympathies; a lover of Nature, 
of the home and of freedom. In the later 
years of his life Lowell entered public life as 
the American Ambassador in London, where 
his delightful personality, his broad culture, 
his wit and a kind of new-world freedom, never 
obtruded but were never concealed, made him 
an ideal representative of his country. He 
had, too, a charming gift of public speech, 
and no one was heard with more pleasure 
on literary and commemorative occasions. 
A scholar in three or four literatures, Lowell 
had an intimate knowledge of the plain 
country folk of his section, the old-time 
Yankee, who, in foreign eyes, has become the 
typical American, although he was the product 
of a small section and represents the country 
as little as the mastodon represents the animal 
world of to-day. Lowell had many gifts, and 
his "Commemoration Ode" at the close of 
the war rose easily to a great national theme ; 
but his most characteristic quality was humor, 
which he used with great effect in the years 
when the encroachment of slavery evoked 
increasing and determined resistance. The 

137 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

"Biglow Papers" are in the Yankee dialect, 
and have ail the Yankee shrewdness and the 
dry Yankee humor. 

Emerson, the descendant of Puritan preach- 
ers and scholars, of a singular unworldliness 
of temper and a nature from which evil 
instincts seemed to be absent, an idealist, 
a reformer and a shrewd observer, who 
taught a philosophy of life which brought the 
simplest duties and tasks into harmony with 
the most daring aspirations, was a poet of a 
few notes of singular purity. He was chiefly 
a writer of essays, but half a dozen poems of 
his are likely to be remembered as long as any 
verse of his period. They are mystical, 
elusive, with not a little of Oriental thought 
in them; but they have a simplicity of form 
and a homeliness of imagery and illustration 
which make them as familiar as the stars and 
as splendidly remote from common things. 
To Emerson the highest thoughts were for 
domestic use, and he held nothing too sacred 
or too divine for human service. As a poet 
his range was limited, he lacked facility in the 
use of verse, and he lacked the fire and color 

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SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

of temperament; but he had a few hours 
of inspiration, and in these hours he wrote 
half a dozen poems of spiritual insight and of 
original phrasing. A radical democrat in 
his conception of life as a spiritual oppor- 
tunity open on equal terms to all men, Emer- 
son regarded slavery as an almost incredible 
anachronism in the nineteenth century and on 
American soil, and assumed its extinction as 
inevitable. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in a colonial 
house within the grounds of the oldest Amer- 
ican university. He was of the purest New 
England blood, and his mind was of the most 
distinctive New England type. He had 
thrown off, ancestrally, the rigid Puritan faith 
and practice, but he retained and expressed 
its moral health, its refinement of taste, its 
fastidiousness of personal association ; he was 
an aristocrat of intellectual temper, with a 
genius for celebrating ancestral achievements 
and local customs. Goethe's genius loci stands 
beside the Ilm in the lovely park at Weimar ; 
Dr. Holmes' genius loci may be found on 
Boston Common. 

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AMERICAN IDEALS 

A teacher of medicine by vocation and not 
without distinction in that field, he was the 
creator of a new literary form in which fiction, 
narrative, philosophy and shrewd observation 
of life were dexterously fused into a vivacious, 
ingenious and suggestive narrative, half fact 
and half fable. His wit was quick, clean, 
neat; he lacked the broad, sympathetic qual- 
ity of Lowell's humor. He was a poet of occa- 
sions, but his occasional verse has a vitality 
of feeling and of fancy which has survived the 
occasions. The lights were extinguished long 
ago, the diners have gone and the rooms are 
silent, but the celebrations of friendship, of 
loyalty to old affections, of tender memory of 
the dead, have become the commemorative 
songs of a later generation. Dr. Holmes' 
novels are original and entertaining, but they 
are the work of a versatile writer using fiction 
to express ideas and theories. Alone among 
the poets of his section, he lacked the tempera- 
ment of the reformer, and the stormy times in 
which he lived affected neither his occupations 
nor his writing. 

To New England and to the Sectional 
140 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

Period belongs a prose writer of high distinc- 
tion, whose place, in any critical estimate of 
the Puritan literature, is beside Emerson. 
The child of a long line of colonists, Hawthorne 
had great beauty of person, a reticence through 
which only a very few passed to intimate 
friendship, a brooding imagination and the 
habit of solitude. He was fortunate in his 
college associations, and ideally fortunate in 
his marriage with a woman of a sensibility as 
delicate as his own, but of great sanity of 
mind. In Miss Wilkins' stories of New 
England there are many lay hermits ; men and 
women who live alone on the outskirts of 
villages or on remote farms, and have only the 
most casual relations with their fellows. 
These recluses are the victims of individual- 
ism become morbid; a type of temperament 
which closely approaches insanity. Haw- 
thorne grew up in such a family, and might 
have taken refuge in solitude and silence but 
for an impulse to express himself which 
became imperative and the devotion of a wife 
who understood and helped him. 

Later he lived in England and in Italy; 
141 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

but, though his imagination was stimulated 
by Italian art and scenery, he was not greatly 
affected by either country. He was an ob- 
server of men and events, but was never on 
intimate terms with life. His intellectual 
detachment was as complete as his personal 
isolation in a period of great agitation. Those 
who were on terms of friendship with him found 
him singularly free from every kind of preten- 
sion, self -poised, acute in observation and power 
of analysis, and capable of complete absorp- 
tion in his work. His wife speaks of him as 
simple, transparent, just, tender and magnan- 
imous, and of a wonderful delicacy of nature. 
"Was there ever," she wrote, "such a union 
of power and gentleness, such softness and 
spirit, passion and reason?" 

In all the New England writers, character 
bore so intimate a relation to genius and was 
so large an element in their work that it is im- 
possible to deal with them simply as artists. 
They were first and always men of conviction, 
and art was to them a form of expression 
rather than a manner of life. But Haw- 
thorne was primarily an artist. His earliest 

142 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

experiments in writing were short sketches 
and shadowy stories ; in which his imagina- 
tion, not yet strong enough for constructive 
work, played with supernatural suggestions, 
morbid experiences, mysterious incidents. In 
many of these sketches there was obvious 
moralization, but it was in the interest of art 
rather than of ethical teaching. Hawthorne 
dealt habitually with the problems of con- 
science, not because he was a teacher of morals, 
but because these problems were part of his 
inheritance, and because they possessed him 
with a sense of their artistic potentiality. 
Many of these sketches were slight in sub- 
stance and manner, but they had a kind of 
twilight beauty. 

His longer stories are not novels; with the 
exception of the "Marble Faun" they are 
romances of the New England mind and tem- 
perament; and the "Marble Faun," wholly 
Italian in background and largely Italian in 
character, is pervaded hy the spirit of the 
Puritans. The "Scarlet Letter," still the 
foremost story written by an American, deals 
with the problem of sin in its moral conse- 

143 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

quences with a penetration of analysis and a 
subtlety of perception that make it the classic 
study of the Puritan conscience. It is so full 
of shadows that we seem to be seeing tragedy 
on a half -lighted stage ; but the sense of the 
grip of the offense on the offender is as unes- 
capable as in Tolstoi's "Anna Karenina." 
The tale is steeped in a dusky splendor like 
the glow of cathedral windows at sunset; 
and the style has the reticence of suggestion 
and the compass of complete expression. 
In "The House of Seven Gables," the "Blithe- 
dale Romance" and the posthumous tales, 
later aspects of New England temperament 
and individualistic attitude of mind are stud- 
ied and sketched with a vitality of imagina- 
tion which makes it impossible to separate 
Hawthorne's style from his subject matter. 
To the period of Sectional America belong 
two or three writers widely known outside 
their own country. Cooper divides with 
Irving the honor of giving American writing 
its larger initial impulse, and of making 
Europe aware that the young communities 
beyond the sea had something significant to 

144 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

express and knew how to express it. Amer- 
ican poetry dates from the publication of 
Bryant's " Thanatopsis " in 1817 and American 
fiction from the appearance of "The Spy" 
in 1821. Stories had been published in Amer- 
ica, but they were experiments rather than 
achievements; and while some of them, the 
tales of Charles Brockden Brown especially, 
have historical interest, they do not count in a 
general survey of American literature. Cooper 
does count ; he is still read in all parts of the 
world, and for many decades in all parts of 
Europe boys have organized themselves into 
bands of Cooper Indians. 

The future novelist spent his childhood on 
the shores of a lake of great beauty in a sec- 
tion of the state of New York intimately asso- 
ciated with the romance and terror of Indian 
warfare. He was of a vigorous, pugnacious 
and aggressive nature ; he heard stories of 
adventure from Indian fighters and trappers, 
for the frontier had only recently been moved 
westward. He was sent to Yale College, 
but his temperament led him into acts of 
insubordination which prematurely ended his 

145 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

career as a student; and he went to sea in 
further pursuit of adventure. After varied 
experiences, valuable chiefly because they 
furnished him with material for several sea 
stories, two of which — "The Pilot'' and 
"The Red Rover" — are still widely read, he 
came ashore, married and made his home in 
the city of New York. 

His first venture in fiction was a dull story 
of English society life, which he knew only by 
hearsay. But "Precaution," which might 
well have died of its name, was succeeded 
and obliterated , the following year by "The 
Spy." The earlier tale was in the mood of 
Provincial America, not yet aware of its own 
resources; the second tale was a story of the 
country lying across the river from New 
York and of the heroic days still remembered 
by many of Cooper's contemporaries. It was 
a stirring tale of the border warfare between 
the patriots and the Tories — as the adher- 
ents of the British government were called 
by the rebellious Americans ; it described 
events of high interest in a history which 
Americans were already idealizing, and it con- 

146 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

tained a strongly drawn character, Harvey 
Birch, the spy, which appealed to the imagina- 
tion and patriotism of the country. "The 
Spy" may be said to have leaped into popu- 
larity both at home and abroad. It was trans- 
lated into many languages, and a year after 
Cooper's death a writer on Nicaragua declared 
that it was the best-known book in English 
in South America ; he found it everywhere. 

"The Spy" was the first story of American 
life by an American, of permanent literary 
value and significance; but other stories as 
distinctively of the soil were to follow and 
surpass it in popular interest. In Indian 
habits, manners and character, which Cooper 
knew at first hand, he had material which was 
not only new but novel. Europe was intensely 
curious about the Indian; from the time of 
the earliest discoveries strange and terrifying 
tales of his cunning and cruelty had passed 
from country to country; and in America 
he was still a menace, a savage and merciless 
foe or an idle drunken loafer. The five 
novels of the Leatherstocking Series were 
novels of adventure which had the significance 

147 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

of history as well as the interest of fiction. 
For the first time the Indian was sympatheti- 
cally presented and the romance of frontier 
life reduced to terms of literature, so to speak. 
For the trapper and the pioneer played almost 
as great a part as the Indian in these tales. 
Leatherstocking is, indeed, Cooper's most 
vital creation ; the lonely figure on the advanc- 
ing line of civilization, a child of the old order 
freed from conventions by companionship 
with Nature ; the pioneer who explored the 
forests, sailed over the great lakes, crossed the 
almost illimitable prairies and plains, from the 
boundaries of the original colonies on the sea- 
board to the ultimate limits of the continent 
on the western sea. 

Cooper's style had neither flexibility nor 
variety; he was a careless writer, almost 
devoid of the finer qualities of the artist; 
he was diffuse and often commonplace, and 
he had little skill in portraiture. But he had 
the qualities demanded by his subjects: rapid 
narrative, graphic description, skill in keeping 
his readers in suspense, and genuine feeling 
for large effects on land and sea. 

148 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

Cooper was an effective writer; Poe was 
preeminently the artist, interested neither in 
public movements nor in private morals, 
but in beauty, and in the workmanship which 
reflects and expresses it. The grandson of a 
soldier of the Revolution, Poe was the first 
Southern writer to make a lasting contribu- 
tion to American literature; there had been 
other prose and verse writers of merit in that 
section, but they were of secondary importance. 
The interest of the South was in politics and 
oratory ; fields in which the section long held a 
commanding position. Slavery was a feudal 
institution; the growing sentiment of the 
world put the South on the defensive; the 
section drifted out of the current of world 
movement ; as a distinguished Southern writer 
of to-day has said : "Assuming provincialism 
to be localism, or being on one side or apart 
from the general movement of contemporary 
life, the South was provincial." Active out- 
of-door habits of life, a population devoted 
largely to agriculture, and a native aptitude 
for politics retarded literary expression among 
a people who had both the temperament and 

149 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the love of action which play so great a part 
in poetry and in fiction. 

Poe was the victim of an unhappy tempera- 
ment and, while he found friends and oppor- 
tunity in the crises in his career, he could 
neither keep the one nor make effective use 
of the other. His uncertain will, his unsettled 
habits, the many interruptions to his work, 
must be taken into account in any estimate 
of his production. He was a tireless and pro- 
lific writer ; but, save in a little group of poems 
and of short stories, his genius never fully 
expressed itself. His life was in his work, for 
he was of a sensitive, highly strung nature, 
and the pursuit of beauty was a passion with 
him ; and yet that work was essentially casual 
and fragmentary. It is well to remember, 
however, that an artist is under the compulsion 
of his temperament, and that the very qualities 
which limit and apparently defeat the largest 
expression of his genius often give his work its 
special distinction both of matter and of man- 
ner. Poe had a keenly analytic mind, but he 
was not a deep and fruitful thinker; he had 
exquisite artistic skill in construction, in dic- 

150 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

tion, in the use of light and shade; but he 
lacked the broad and rich humanity of the 
great poets. His intelligence was clear and 
penetrating and took him far in the explora- 
tion of morbid temperaments ; but it did not 
take him to the sources of poetic vitality, 
of great human qualities, of that abounding 
humor which is the overflow of a rich, whole- 
some nature. Poe was inventive rather than 
creative; he devised stories of fascinating 
intellectual ingenuity in which he played 
with his readers as if a chessboard were 
between them; he knew terror and mystery, 
and he had almost magical skill in taking 
possession not only of the imagination but 
of the senses of his readers. He was a magi- 
cian rather than a man of creative genius ; 
he stood outside his work ; a pathetic spectral 
man of genius pursuing a substance which 
somehow changed to shadow when he over- 
took it. 

Poe's distinction lies in the fact that he was 
preeminently the artist among American writ- 
ers of his time ; that he wrote a few lyrics of 
exquisite beauty ; that he created a new kind 

151 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

of writing in what is called the story of Ratio- 
cination ; that he made the short story a work 
of art; and that, both by his exposition of 
literary principles and his criticism of the 
work of the writers of his time, he raised the 
standards and defined the methods of the 
art of writing. "The Murders in the Rue 
Morgue," "The Purloined Letter" and "The 
Gold Bug" have a European reputation; 
and, with "The Pit and the Pendulum," 
"William Wilson," "Ligeia," "The Fall of the 
House of Usher" and other tales of mystery 
and horror, and "Israfel," "Al Aaraaf," 
"The Haunted Palace," "Lines to Helen," 
"The City in the Sea " and other poems of 
magical euphonic beauty, have given Poe a 
distinctive influence in French and German 
literature. 

In these writers, who may stand as repre- 
sentatives of a large group, New England, 
New York and the Middle Colonies and the 
South recorded their local traits, tempera- 
ment, convictions. They are the voices of 
Sectional America ; dealing with many things 
which were common to men of all parts of 

152 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

the country, but speaking from the sectional 
consciousness. There have always been men 
in America who have foreseen its development, 
and in the days of the struggling colonies 
predicted the corning nation ; and more than 
once in Emerson, in Lowell, in Whittier, one 
heard the vibration of the national note ; 
but the note of prophecy lacks the resonance, 
the fullness of tone, the vibrating quality of 
the note of fulfillment. 

The nation was born in the throes of the four 
years' War between the States ; a struggle of 
tremendous forces waged with equal deter- 
mination and patriotic devotion by both con- 
testants. The question of the extension of 
the system of slavery into the newer States 
disappeared as the struggle deepened in the 
consciousness of the people into a conflict 
between two opposing views of the structure 
of the government. Was it a voluntary asso- 
ciation of sovereign States dissoluble at will, or 
was it a Nation ? 

Each year on memorial days the men 
who fought in both armies march in thin- 
ning ranks through great crowds, hushed into 

153 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

silence or breaking into cheers as they pass ; 
but already the old antagonisms are buried, 
and a nation has come out of the storm and 
anguish of those years. But what has been 
happily called a moral miracle of reconcilia- 
tion does not blur the agony of those years, 
the haunting sense of peril to things as dear 
as life and to persons far dearer, the exhaust- 
ing drain on the resources of the country, the 
heart-breaking suspense. 

In these soul-searching experiences a nation 
was born. The practical work went on, as 
such work must go on, in the very throes of 
revolution, but the country waited at times 
with bated breath for news from the battle- 
fields, and all other interests waited on the 
course of events. Spirited lyrics were written 
on both sides, and the nation came out of the 
struggle with three or four songs which gave ex- 
pression to deep feeling or passionate devotion 
to both causes. Of these the most impressive 
is "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"; the 
most poetic in phrase and feeling is "Mary- 
land, My Maryland" ; while the most "catch- 
ing," to use a word which carries with it a 

154 



SECTIONAL LITERATURE 

sense of immediate appeal easy to remember 
and of singable rhythm, is " Dixie," the popular 
Confederate song, which Mr. Lincoln, in a 
speech from the porch of the White House 
a few nights before his death, humorously 
said the nation had acquired by conquest. 
"The Star-Spangled Banner," the national 
anthem, is neither poetic in diction nor easily 
singable by crowds of people, and Americans 
still wait for a national hymn which shall be at 
once noble and simple. 



15 



VI 

NATIONAL LITERATURE 

The War between the States not only made 
the power of the Federal government supreme 
and the union of States indissoluble, but it 
defined the national idea in terms which the 
whole country understood. There was no 
breaking down of State lines ; they are as defi- 
nite as they were before the struggle ; but the 
States are no longer sovereign ; they are inte- 
gral and inviolable parts of a larger sover- 
eignty. There will always be differences of 
opinion with regard to the proper division of 
authority between the States and the nation ; 
but the fundamental question of supreme au- 
thority has been settled forever. Americans 
who used to consider questions of policy from 
the standpoint of their several States now con- 
sider such questions from the standpoint of 
the nation ; and those who used to think in 
terms of a section now think in terms of a 
continent. 

156 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

In the making of a nation there must be 
means of free intercourse between different 
sections and free interchange of information 
and ideas. One of the most competent stu- 
dents of American life, M. Brunetiere, the 
distinguished critic and editor of the Revue 
de Deux Mondes, as the result of a journey 
of observation across the continent, expressed 
his conviction that one of the most serious 
obstacles to the development of the higher 
civilization in America is the distance between 
the leading cities. New Orleans, for instance, 
is 1400 miles distant from Boston, Chicago 
1100 miles from Washington, and San Fran- 
cisco 3000 miles from New York. These great 
distances between sections would have been 
almost insuperable obstacles to the growth 
of a vital unity of opinion, feeling and action 
between the East and the West if they had 
not been diminished by modern methods of 
communication. In the days of the stage- 
coach and the canal, a self-governing na- 
tion of continental magnitude would have 
been impossible. The divergence of political 
ideas and feeling between the North and the 

1S7 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

South was greatly intensified by the ignorance 
of each section of the point of view and 
habits of thought of the other. The War 
between the States created a nation; trans- 
continental lines of railroads, habitual use of 
the telegraph, the introduction of the tele- 
phone, mailing facilities, furnished the in- 
strumentalities which annihilated distance, 
obliterated time and made the continent 
workable. And in recent years the area of 
neighborhoods has been greatly extended 
by trolley lines, automobiles, bicycles, the 
rural delivery of the mails. 

Americans possess their continent in every 
part, not only by residence, but by the habit 
of travel. They make long journeys on the 
shortest notice and as a matter of course. 
Every week Americans travel 550,000,000 
miles on railroads, and every year they spend 
$504,000,000 on railroad tickets. The auto- 
mobile, which began its career as the toy of 
the very rich, has been speedily democratized, 
and its uses for rapid communication between 
localities and for local delivery have been 
developed to such an extent that it is as 

158 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

much a part of the general system of commu- 
nication as the railroad or the steamboat. 
In brief, for purposes of travel, the continent 
is no larger than was New England fifty years 
ago ; and for purposes of communication of 
knowledge and ideas it has become a neigh- 
borhood. 

Sectional America expressed its mind and 
revealed its spirit in a literature which, 
while not of the first importance judged by 
universal standards, revealed talent of a high 
order and a rich content of varied experi- 
ence ; what has National America achieved in 
the field of spiritual and artistic expression 
and in what degree does its internal commerce 
of thought rival its commercial development 
and unify the many minds of its people? 
At the close of the war two poets of strikingly 
contrasted ideals and conditions began to 
make themselves heard. Many of the older 
poets were still writing, and the tradition of 
the New England group and of Poe had 
established, not only a standard of workman- 
ship, but had identified poetry in the mind of 
the country with certain principles of selec- 

159 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

tion of subjects proper for poetic treatment, 
and with a dignity of manner which had 
acquired a professional authority. 

The appearance of Walt Whitman gave the 
literary proprieties a distinct shock, and, as 
often happens in the case of men whose 
genius is in excess of their training and taste, 
his eccentricities attracted the attention of 
the many, while his imagination, which had 
a quality new in American literature, was 
recognized by few. To the sharp criticism 
of his neglect of form and his lack of reticence 
— much of which was eminently sound and 
just — Whitman was indifferent. He was 
without social or educational background; 
he had never been in a university atmosphere ; 
literary and social traditions did not exist 
for him ; what had been said and the way in 
which it had been said were matters of indif- 
ference to him; his only concern was to give 
free expression of his own personality. With 
nonchalant ease he began with the declara- 
tion "I celebrate myself," and this celebration 
went on to the day of his death. He was the 
son of a mechanic, lived in the neighborhood 

160 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

of New York, attended the public schools, 
read novels omnivorously, and also the English 
Bible, Shakespeare, Ossian and such trans- 
lations as came his way of the Greek tragedies, 
the Nibelungenlied, Dante and a few Oriental 
poems. He had little formal training, but 
acquaintance with some of the masters of 
universal literature. He lived not far from 
the sea and early felt its fascination. 

He loved association with men of primitive 
vigor and habits, and comradeship was his 
habit as well as his social ideal. He spent 
much time in the streets, and on the ferries 
that then, in great numbers, crossed the two 
rivers between which the city of New York 
lies; he became a printer and journalist and 
combined both occupations with a roving 
disposition ; he learned at first hand the work- 
ing people in many parts of the country. 
During the war he served as a volunteer army 
nurse, and endeared himself to many men in 
the ranks by his gentleness, patience and the 
quality of comradeship to which he gave so 
much space in his verse. Impaired health 
made active work impossible, and Whitman's 

161 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

closing years were spent in busy idleness ; 
he was cared for by devoted friends, writing 
when the mood seized him, discussing his 
contemporaries and their work with great 
freedom, and showing himself on occasions 
of literary interest. His disciples were few 
in numbers, but of an aggressive spirit of de- 
votion; the country at large recognizes his 
genius, but has never taken him to its heart. 
The fundamental thought in his work is 
his conception of Democracy as a vast brother- 
hood, in which all men are on an equality, 
irrespective of individual traits and qualities. 
There is nothing finer in him than his passion 
for comradeship; in his idealization of the 
fellowship between man and man he not only 
sounded some sincere notes, but he struck 
out some great lines in the heat of a feeling 
which seems always to have had quick access 
to his imagination. To this all-embracing 
affection, so deeply rooted in his conception 
of the democratic order, he devotes a large 
group of poems. His friends of the spirit were 
not chosen by any principle of taste; they 
are chiefly " powerful uneducated persons. " 

162 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

It cannot be said with justice that Whitman 
erases all moral distinctions and rejects en- 
tirely the scale of spiritual values ; but it 
is quite certain that he blurs them, and re- 
duces his world to unity by putting aside 
the principle of selection. His underlying 
religious conception of life is essentially Ori- 
ental, and dates back to the time before the 
idea of personality had been clearly grasped. 
This conception Whitman does not consistently 
apply, for he lays tremendous emphasis on 
"powerful uneducated persons"; but it is 
wrought into his presentation of the demo- 
cratic order of society. 

Whitman was a pathfinder, and his joy in 
the new world of human experience he ex- 
plored no one would take from him. It 
will be seen some day that there was a true 
prophetic strain in him ; and that he marked 
the beginning, not of a new kind of literature, 
but of a new and national stage of literary 
development in America. In his verse the 
sections disappear and the Nation comes into 
view; the provinces fade and the continent 
defines itself. It is man at work over a 

163 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

continent that stirs him; he celebrates few 
persons ; Lincoln alone seems to have moved 
him profoundly; even when he celebrates 
himself, it is as an incarnation and embodi- 
ment of human qualities and experiences. 

While Whitman was making a system out 
of the confused movement of Democracy, 
Sidney Lanier, in life and in verse, was giving 
the old-time quality of distinction fresh and 
modern illustration. A Southerner by birth ; 
of gentle breeding ; a student at a small local 
college; a soldier in the Confederate army; 
captured and imprisoned by the Federal 
troops; released without resources and walking 
the long distance to his home; trying the 
occupations of clerk and teacher in a vain 
search for his vocation ; happily married to 
a woman who gave him the sustaining com- 
radeship of complete understanding and de- 
votion ; early developing pulmonary weakness 
and fighting for his life with indomitable pa- 
tience and desperate courage, — Lanier found 
at last, in the Johns Hopkins University, 
opportunities of study and of work. He was 
an accomplished musician in the theory as 

164 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

well as in the practice of the art, and he became 
an expert in knowledge of English literature, 
especially of the early texts. An appoint- 
ment as lecturer in English at the University 
gave him financial support and more leisure 
for writing. In his " Science of English Verse " 
the thoroughness of his methods and the 
great importance he attached to music, in 
the technical sense, in versification, were 
clearly shown. His passion for music and 
his conviction that it furnished the key to 
English verse seriously affected the spon- 
taneity and natural melody of his own poetry. 
His technical knowledge gave his verse at 
times an intellectual rather than a verbal 
perfection, and only in a few pieces does his 
genius find free and musical expression. 

For he had genius of a kind which was new 
in American poetry. Other poets had in- 
vested the aspects of the seasons, the forms of 
work in the fields, seedtime and harvest, 
with poetic significance; Lanier had the 
sense of the deep, moving life of things, of the 
faint stirrings of growth individually inaudible 
but collectively musical, of the arching sky 

165 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

which sends across the marshes waves of 
color, and of the atmosphere in which the 
soul of a landscape seems to brood over it. 
The group of poems called "The Marshes of 
Glynn" are in curious contrast with New 
England poetry. The solitude and mystery 
of those moving stretches of live-oaks, swaying 
grasses, murmuring leaves, 

"low couched along the sea," 
are inviolable, and yet they seem, in the poet's 
vision, like a beautiful, many colored parable 
of human condition and destiny. In his 
song of the "Corn" the vital processes of 
nature are notated, so to speak, with a pene- 
tration which searches their very roots in 
the secrecy of mother earth, and registers, 
in the same moment, the long, slow waves 
of sound which sweep over great fields when 
the winds pass. Lanier said of Poe that he 
knew too little ; it may be said of Lanier that 
he knew too much. His knowledge sometimes 
handicapped his spontaneity ; and his verse 
became scientific in its precision of statement. 
But he died young ; he had very noble quali- 
ties of nature and of mind, and he must be 

166 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

counted one of the most original American 
poets. 

In Whitman and Lanier one is aware of a 
larger movement of imagination, a new-world 
air of freedom and space. The most obvious 
fact in the history of American writing since 
National America was born is the extension of 
literary interest and expression. The working 
and publishing centers for writers, as for 
artists, are still Boston and New York ; but 
the whole continent makes c mtributions of 
books and pictures to these centers of distri- 
bution. In the field of fiction especially 
there has come into being a series of studies — 
a national comedie humaine — as comprehen- 
sive of local character and as rich in variety 
of temperament and habit as the nation. 

The writing of the Provincial Period, which 
lasted until the appearance of Irving, Long- 
fellow and Bryant, was crude in form and imi- 
tative in spirit; that of the Sectional Period, 
which lasted from about 1820 to the close of 
the War between the States in 1865, was on 
a high plane of workmanship and breathed 
a lofty spirit of independence and faith in 

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AMERICAN IDEALS 

human endeavor. But it was largely under 
the influence of English tradition and example ; 
it was the literature of a people setting out 
boldly and confidently to try the experiment 
of Democracy, but with, as yet, little con- 
ception of the magnitude of the task; a 
people with the high aspiration, the entire 
self-confidence, the proud and sometimes 
insolent consciousness of strength, which are 
characteristics of youth. The Nation had an 
abiding faith in its destiny, but it had not 
taken possession of the continent, it had not 
faced the problems of a complex and swiftly 
developing prosperity and of the sudden influx 
of races bred under radically different con- 
ditions : in a word, the literature of Sectional 
America was the literature of a people which 
had not yet found itself. 

Since the close of the war which established 
the Nation as the supreme political power, 
the American people have been coming to self- 
realization through knowledge of their history 
and through recognition of the grave problems 
which confront them. One of the striking facts 
in the American life of the last forty years 

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NATIONAL LITERATURE 

has been the growth of the historical spirit 
and the widespread interest in the begin- 
nings of the Nation. A historical literature 
of lasting value had come into existence 
during the Sectional period ; but it is sig- 
nificant that, with a single notable excep- 
tion, it dealt with foreign subjects. In 
point of style it had great charm, because it 
was the work of men of literary rather than 
of scientific or archaeological training. Irving's 
residence in Spain bore fruit in an account of 
"The Conquest of Granada," the "Voyages 
and Discoveries of Columbus " and in the 
"Legends of The Conquest of Spain," con- 
ceived in the romantic spirit and written in 
a picturesque style. His biographies of 
Columbus, of Mahomet, of Goldsmith and of 
Washington are delightful footnotes to his- 
tory. Prescott, a man of winning personality, 
whose blindness gave his work a heroic qual- 
ity, was also drawn to subjects of romantic 
interest and told the story of the reign of 
"Ferdinand and Isabella," of "The Conquest 
of Mexico " and of Peru with the vivid 
interest of a novelist. Motley, a diplomatist 

169 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and scholar, found themes congenial to Ameri- 
cans in the heroic age of the Dutch Republic 
and the United Netherlands ; Bancroft, who 
also had experience as a diplomatist, wrote 
the first elaborate history of the United States 
in ten volumes; a work based on patient 
research, but written in a provincial style. 

It was reserved for Parkman, a half -blind 
scholar and a lover of roses, to sketch with 
vigorous and picturesque hand the local 
background of American history in his account 
of Indian life and organization, and his 
brilliant story of the struggle between England 
and France for supremacy in America; a 
struggle as momentous in its consequences as 
the War of the Revolution and possibly of 
more decisive importance. 

Americans had been too busy dealing with 
the present and making ready for the future 
to pay much attention to the past, and many 
parts of the country were without a past. 
But the War between the States definitely 
marked the end of an era, and closed a long 
chapter in the development of the country. 
Americans had talked heroically of their 

170 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

struggles ; now they turned to a more serious 
study of their experiences with a desire to 
formulate the principles on which they had 
acted, often instinctively, and to understand 
what had been achieved and how it had been 
accomplished. Local history, which had been 
neglected save in a few localities, began to be 
studied with zeal ; historical sites were marked 
by monuments ; historical societies were or- 
ganized in all parts of the country; and the 
teaching of history in the universities, which 
had been largely formal and of minor impor- 
tance in the scheme of study, became a major 
subject; departments took the place of the 
single professor, and research work the place 
of instruction from textbooks. In the univer- 
sities of the Central West the investigation 
of local origins was prosecuted with enthusi- 
asm; on the Pacific coast the early Spanish 
records were rescued and put in shape for 
future historians ; in the Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity laboratory methods were used to con- 
struct contemporary history by the study of 
magazines and newspapers. 

The popular study of history has been 
171 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

carried on, not only in the public schools, but 
by clubs in all parts of the country, by lectures, 
by public commemorations of historical events 
and anniversaries, by historical pageants, 
often of artistic merit. Meanwhile the libra- 
ries have been enriched by many historical 
works of value ; studies of aspects of American 
history, of epochs, of administrations, of wars, 
of pioneering and settlement; of States, 
towns, counties and villages ; and half-a-dozen 
histories of the United States have told the 
story for students and for popular reading as 
well. Schouler, McMaster, Adams, Rhodes, 
Fiske, have written the history of the United 
States from different points of view, and a 
large group of scholars have reenforced these 
broader surveys by studies of narrower scope 
but of lasting importance ; and the footnotes 
to this national work in history in the form 
of biography have been almost numberless. 

In this new interest in the beginnings of 
the nation the present was not overlooked; 
on the contrary, there appeared in different 
parts of the country, almost simultaneously, 
a group of writers of fiction who brought the 

172 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

short story to a perfection of form and of 
style not surpassed in any other literature. 
In character drawing, in the delicate art of 
sketching a background which has a vital 
relation to the story, in beauty of diction, 
many of these stories belong not only to 
American but to universal literature. Much 
has been said in America about "the great 
American novel"; the story that shall put 
between covers the very life of the nation in 
dramatic terms. That novel will never be 
written, because it is impossible to write 
it. "Vanity Fair" is a work of genius, but 
only a little section of English society gets 
into it, and the nation is mute in its pages. 
"Pere Goriot" is also a masterpiece, but it is 
not even French in a large sense; it is Parisian. 
Tolstoi's "War and Peace" comes nearer 
being a great national novel, but it is already 
the story of a past age and of a Russia which 
has passed through radical changes. In a 
society in such different stages of develop- 
ment as the American, and affected by such 
a great variety of local conditions, a novel 
which shall present the form and substance of 

173 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the nation's character and manners is ob- 
viously beyond the range of possibility ; this 
all-inclusive story demands the scope of a 
comedie humaine. Such a vital report of 
the form and color of their life Americans 
possess in their short stories, in which, al- 
though their literature still lacks the years of 
a full century, they have produced work of 
the highest quality. 

There had been writers of fiction in the 
South before Poe wrote his stories of mystery ; 
but he first showed a high degree of artistic 
power, and of their kind these stories remain 
unsurpassed; but Poe was not of a locality, 
not even of a nation ; his imagination created 
its own world and his figures are visionary and 
spectral; they are like disembodied spirits. 
There is no part of America in which men and 
women are less elusive and generic and more 
human and individualistic than in the South ; 
a section in which the code of honor has 
been held at times in higher respect than 
the law, and sentiment and feeling had far 
more appeal than reason. 

Life on the plantations supplied a large 
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NATIONAL LITERATURE 

margin of leisure, respect for women became 
a cult as in the days of chivalry, but had 
its root in absolute purity of sex relations; 
and purity and leisure created an atmosphere 
of romance which blurred the hard outlines 
of slavery with a luminous mist. The open 
door, the open hand, and formality of manner 
tempered with winning cordiality, invested 
the old southern society with great charm. 
When the present generation of southern 
writers appeared on the stage, this social order 
had become a thing of the past, but it was 
still visible in a soft sunset light. In such 
stories as "Meh Lady" and "Mars Chan," 
by Mr. Page, a Virginian, this vanished society 
lives again in sentiment and ideal ; while the 
Virginian moving across the mountains and be- 
coming a frontiersman in Kentucky reappears 
in the beautiful art of Mr. James Lane Allen. 
In the farther South the naive local elegance 
of the French manner, become captivatingly 
quaint in the French quarter in New Orleans 
where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of 
Mexico, is to be found in Mr. Cable's "Old 
Creole Days," and "Madam Delphine." 

175 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

Georgia, a state of more primitive types, has 
furnished homely humor and strongly marked 
types of native character to fiction ; and Joel 
Chandler Harris, coming on the scene while 
the negro folk tales were still told to children, 
made "Uncle Remus" as famous in America as 
Rip Van Winkle ; and the stories of the inimi- 
table humor, pathos and cunning of the slave 
put into the mouth of this old negro form, 
perhaps, the most original American contribu- 
tion not only to the literature of the last two 
decades, but to folklore as well. The moun- 
taineers of Tennessee have been drawn against 
their striking mountain background by Miss 
Murfree and Mr. Fox. 

Very early in this period Bret Harte wrote 
the rough romance of the mining camp with 
a fresh unconventionality and an energy 
of imagination which made certain kinds of 
frontier life familiar to the Nation. Samuel 
Clemens, better known as "Mark Twain," 
in his first and most original books, "Huckle- 
berry Finn," "Tom Sawyer" and "Life on 
the Mississippi," portrayed life on the great 
river with a vital art and overflowing humor 

176 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

only temporarily eclipsed by his more popular 
but less original later work. The Far West 
of yesterday was fortunately seen in the last 
days of the grazing age by Mr. Wister, who has 
reported it with zest and sympathy; and, 
avoiding the melodramatic, has drawn the 
cowboy with his elemental virtues and vices. 
The vigor of the Central West, unconventional 
but overflowing with helpfulness and humor, 
radically democratic in spirit and optimistic 
in temper, has found capable recorders in 
Mr. Garland, Mr. Herrick and other novelists. 

In New England there has been a report of 
the various types of character and of changing 
social and personal ideals of such vitality and 
charm as to worthily supplement the work 
of the earlier writers of this section. Miss 
Jewett by her quiet humor, her unobtrusive 
gift for character drawing and the refinement 
of her style, has become an American classic. 
Mrs. Mary Wllkins Freeman has reported 
New England individualism in terms of modern 
character with realistic skill relieved by humor. 

In the cosmopolitan field Mr. James has 
written the short story with subtilty of insight, 

177 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and Mr. Howells, his contemporary, with less 
elaboration of manner and more kindly and 
pervasive humor, has reported the foibles of 
one type of American woman with delightful 
skill. 

The short story, while as exacting in its 
demands on the writer as the novel, imposes 
limitations of material and of manner from 
which the novelist escapes; and the painter 
of the major motives of American life needs 
a large canvas. Between Hawthorne and 
Mr. Howells there was a vast production of 
mediocre novels, with one notable exception ; 
Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at 
white heat ; she was a woman of vivid imagi- 
nation, of eloquent and flowing style and of 
strong convictions, but she was very imper- 
fectly trained in her art. The novel was a 
picture, and not a distorted picture, of slavery 
in its kindly patriarchal and its harsh indus- 
trial aspects. The anti-slavery agitation 
was becoming widespread ; bitter feeling had 
been engendered and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 
came at the psychological moment and in- 
tensified the feeling. The strikingly dramatic 

178 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

treatment of the very human material out of 
which the story was made, the intensity 
of feeling which imparted to it the driving 
force of a great passion, gave the story cur- 
rency not only in America but in nearly all 
the languages of Europe; and until Mark 
Twain's books appeared no American book 
was so widely read. 

Mrs. Stowe's novel was carried into popu- 
larity by the momentum of a great reform 
as well as by its own force ; but it was not a 
work of art; on the contrary, it was marred 
by much crudity of form. The early work 
of Mr. Ho wells and Mr. James, on the other 
hand, was delightfully artistic. Both were 
men of modern education; interested in 
modern rather than in the classic literatures in 
which the earlier writers had been trained; 
and both were concerned with American life 
in its contemporaneous aspects. Mr. Howells 
has sketched, with a light hand and with 
kindly humor, the manners and ways of 
the American woman of the very feminine 
type; but he has also, in "The Rise of 
Silas Lapham," painted the portrait of the 

179 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

self-made man, of whom there are so many in 
America. 

Mr. James lived in London for many years 
and saw his fellow countrymen, and especially 
his fellow countrywomen, against a back- 
ground which threw their ways of thinking, 
of acting and of speaking into very effective 
relief. He belongs to a family which has 
won distinction in philosophy and the psy- 
chological interest of his stories has of late 
obscured their dramatic interest. He has, 
however, a rare talent for characterization 
and he is a master of the more subtle uses of 
language. He has distinction of manner 
rather than the grand manner, and his large 
canvases are painted with the refinement 
of cabinet pieces. 

There are in America to-day a number of 
novelists of high attainment as artists and 
there are more whose work is stamped by 
vitality and force rather than by skill. The 
older and more conventional society of the 
East has found in such novels as "The House 
of Mirth" studies of that small subdivision 
popularly known as "the Smart Set" of a 

180 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

veracity so minute and unsparing as to 
produce the effect of satire ; while stories 
of a broader outlook and of a freer manner, 
like "The Awakening of Helena Richie" 
and "The Iron Woman," have dramatized 
the problems of human experience with vital 
skill. The afterglow of earlier and local 
social ideals in a small community is reflected 
in the pages of Mr. Wister's "Lady Balti- 
more"; and the broad humor, the elemental 
passions, the full-blooded and unashamed 
humanity of the frontier, in his story of far- 
western life, "The Virginian." In a novel of 
Kansas life, "A Certain Rich Man," the 
biography, not only of a pioneer but of a 
community, may be read. 

Stories of adventure are still written by 
Americans in great numbers, but the heroes of 
these tales are engineers, miners, railroad 
builders and organizers of great enterprises; 
and for the last two decades the human 
aspects of what is called "big business" have 
received increasing attention from novelists. 
In a series of three novels, only two of which 
were finished before his death, Frank Norris 

181 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

set out to write in terms of human expe- 
rience the epic of wheat; its production in 
the vast fields of the Southwest, its passage 
through the vortex of the exchange in Chicago, 
its distribution to the far ends of the earth. 
In the hands of a young man the effort was 
premature, but it was significant of the present 
tendency in fiction to dramatize the tremen- 
dous forces evoked by American conditions, 
their reaction on character and life, and the 
problems they have created. 

Americans are much given to the reading 
of fiction, and novels are manufactured in 
large quantities by facile writers to meet the 
popular demand. These stories are, as a 
rule, morally clean, and they are not devoid 
of invention and ^dramatic situation; but 
they are imitative and crude and have no 
place in any account of American literature. 

The passing of the older group of poets was 
coincident with great changes in the national 
life; a wave of unprecedented prosperity 
rolled over the country, vast enterprises were 
projected and carried through, the engineer 
and the financier became th e roost prominent 

18? 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

figures in the arena. Education took a prac- 
tical turn, technical and trade schools multi- 
plied, and scientific education began to lead 
literary education in popular interest. The 
war with Spain for the liberation of Cuba, 
with the unforeseen appearance of the Ameri- 
can flag in the Far East, stirred the imagination 
of the Nation, not with dreams of conquest or 
with military ambition, but with a sense of 
national solidarity and of national responsi- 
bilities. Without surrendering the policy of 
avoiding entanglements with other nations 
and keeping out of the circle of international 
politics in the Old World, defined by Washing- 
ton, the Nation awoke to the consciousness of 
world-wide relations and of the responsibilities 
which came with such relations. The enor- 
mous development of business and the rapid 
accumulation of capital created problems 
new to American life. 

Meantime the whole world was moving 
with dramatic rapidity. Japan had taken 
her place on the stage of world activity with 
startling suddenness, and in her brilliant 
achievements in arms and industry Americans 

183 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

were quick to see the dawn of a new day in 
the East, the emergence of influences and 
ideals which will temper and enrich western 
civilization. The story of humanity, told in 
serial form in the newspapers day by day, 
became of absorbing interest. The literature 
of economics, sociology, government, politics, 
reform grew rapidly to large proportions, 
and for the time being books of knowledge, 
of political and social philosophy, hold the 
attention of the Nation and books of purely 
literary quality are given less prominence. 
This does not mean that Americans are losing 
their inherited idealism; for the movements 
which are fast realigning political parties in 
the United States express the growing de- 
termination to bring both politics and business 
into greater harmony with political and 
social ideals. 

Poetry, meantime, has less vogue; largely, 
it may be suspected, because few poets have 
not yet spoken with compelling power the 
words the people are longing to hear. In the 
generation which followed the War between 
the States there was a group of poets whose 

184 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

feeling for artistic qualities was keener than 
their predecessors; a great reform had been 
carried to completion and a period of ethical 
relaxation and ease of mood followed. Of 
this period perhaps the country will remember 
longest Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a poet whom 
the French would have called a "little master," 
so exquisite was his craftsmanship, so delicate 
his art. Mr. Moody, Mr. Woodberry and 
Dr. Van Dyke have enriched American poetry 
with work of lasting charm and vitality. 

Other poets there were, bred under academic 
influence, whose work has notable beauty 
but lacks the appeal to the popular imagina- 
tion. In the youngest generation of poets 
now beginning to make themselves heard new 
phases of life appear; often presented, it is 
true, in the harsh phrase of the reformer, 
but indicative of a shifting of interest from 
classical and traditional themes to the human 
needs and aspirations of to-day. The themes 
of poetry are rarely wholly new, but the 
deepening passion for social justice finds 
expression in protest against inhuman con- 
ditions of life and work, and in dramatic 

185 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

appeals for a larger regard for the welfare of 
the workers. American poetry has always 
been idealistic, and has interpreted national 
opportunity in terms of spiritual and moral 
responsibility ; to-day it has become altruistic 
and its themes are justice for the worker, 
international peace and human brotherhood. 
This newer poetry has yet to prove its claims 
to be heard by the manner as well as the matter 
of its message ; but it is full of promise. The 
vigorous recent production of poetic plays 
may be characterized in the same words. 
Since the days of Irving the essay has been a 
form of literature congenial to the American 
type of mind. Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, 
Thoreau, Curtis used it as a medium for 
criticism, for informal philosophy, for ethical 
and social teaching. Its best traditions of 
sanity of thought, humor and soundness of 
forms are continued to-day in the work of 
Mr. Burroughs, of Messrs. Bliss Perry, Frank 
Colby, Brander Matthews, Henry D. Sedgwick, 
Dr. Van Dyke and Dr. Crothers and others. 
In power of analysis and intellectual force 
and integrity Mr. BrownelFs critical essays 

186 



NATIONAL LITERATURE 

hold a place by themselves in American writ- 
ing. 

Of the many names mentioned in this survey 
of American literature as an expression of the 
American life only half a dozen have world- 
wide range : Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, 
Mark Twain. The great body of contribu- 
tors to the national literature are known only 
in their own country. If one looks at litera- 
ture as significant in the degree in which it 
produces masterpieces, the American must 
wait, as other peoples have waited, for a more 
complete fusion of the elements of national 
life and the broader and deeper national con- 
sciousness that will come with it. But if 
one consider literature as an expression of the 
soul of a people, American literature has 
already, less than a century from its birth, 
attained lasting significance. It is the spoken 
word of a people whose beginning was a great 
adventure, and whose life has been a great 
toil. 

What have their books to tell us of their 
innermost thoughts ? What sent them across 
the perilous seas and has kept them to their 

187 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

tasks ? Briefly these things : passion for 
liberty, sense of moral order and responsibility, 
faith in God and man, love of home and of 
Nature ; and a habit of humor born of hope, 
of courage and of the good will of a community 
which has spread from ocean to ocean, but 
still keeps the neighborly feeling which makes 
the village, in time of calamity or of need, one 
family. 



188 



VII 

THE AMERICAN IN ART 

In the pre-Revolutionary period there were 
churches that charmed the eye and conveyed 
a sense of their uses to the mind in Ports- 
mouth, Newport, New York, Wilmington, 
Charleston ; and there were houses which 
happily harmonized material and form, and 
were suggestive of social background and 
vistas of an older social order, in Salem, 
Boston, Providence, Bristol, Newport, New 
York, Philadelphia, Germantown, Annapolis, 
Richmond, Charleston, and smaller towns. 
Colonial architecture at its best suggested 
a good tradition and expressed an honest 
fact; it expressed history and a sound rela- 
tion to the soil. It had that ultimate ele- 
gance, entire simplicity, which was char- 
acteristic of the best colonial life, and that 
dignity which was the stateliness of the Old 
modified by the conditions of the New World. 
The churches built under the inspiration of 

189 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

Sir Christopher Wren, and the fine old homes, 
of which the Sherborne house in Portsmouth, 
the Jumel mansion in New York, and Mount 
Vernon, may serve as examples, bore the 
impress of a certain distinction of taste and 
form which were the heritage of the few, but 
of inestimable importance to the many, as 
examples of true American architecture. 
They were as vitally related to their surround- 
ings as are the gray old great houses of Eng- 
land and the square-towered country churches 
to the low skies and deep foliage of the ripe 
and mellow landscape. They constituted, 
with the little group of buildings like Inde- 
pendence Hall in Philadelphia, a native order 
of building, adapted, it is true, but not 
imitative. They stood for Provincial Amer- 
ica, with its face turned eastward, and still 
bound to Europe by kinship if not by iden- 
tity of standards and interests. 

Architectural chaos came much later, but 
the empire of the commonplace had been 
established in all parts of the country as 
early as 1840. American writers had been 
telling the truth for many years before 

190 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

later American builders began to do any- 
thing more radical than mumble a few com- 
monplaces; when they started out to speak 
for themselves they made sad work of it. 
To begin with, they did not speak the truth ; 
they were ungrammatical ; worst of all, 
they were vulgar. During the period which 
followed the War between the States, which 
has been aptly called the reign of terror in 
American architecture, crimes against stone, 
wood, iron, and form of every kind were per- 
petrated, which still cry aloud for vengeance. 
It was in this period that post offices and other 
federal buildings were sown broadcast over 
a helpless land, and ugliness in almost unbro- 
ken monotony was set up as a symbol of 
public life. There were a few redeeming 
exceptions, but for the most part the state 
buildings of this period were monstrous of- 
fenses against public morals and public taste. 
This was the period, too, of the so-called 
reconstruction policy, which was a shocking 
parody of the sublime tragedy of the War; 
and it is significant that shining deeds of 
valor, and heroes whom youth and death 

191 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

had touched with a double beauty, were 
commemorated at this time with monuments 
and statues, of many of which it is merciful 
to write that they were executed not in mal- 
ice, but in ignorance. Never before, perhaps, 
has a great sacrifice found such meaningless 
expression in monumental form ; and it will 
be the pious task of a later generation to raze 
many of these monuments to the ground, 
and worthily commemorate a sublime chapter 
of national history. 

During this lawless period all sorts of 
hybrids were brought to birth, and many still 
remain to remind us of our mortality : houses 
so entirely made with hands that no sugges- 
tion of mind flows from them ; Italian villas 
(pronounced with a long I) ; stone castles 
with colonial additions; Elizabethan man- 
sions with late Victorian piazzas and veran- 
das; structures of no order but with vast 
cupolas; and, worst of all, riotous varia- 
tions of that shamefully abused Queen Anne 
house, which, in its proper form and place, 
has a real relation to domestic life and 
beauty of adaptation. 

192 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

There was admirable building in the co- 
lonial and sub-revolutionary period ; then 
came the age of the commonplace and the 
monotonously undistinguished ; to be fol- 
lowed, after a great national crisis, by an 
outbreak of self-assertion, which was anar- 
chistic in its wild and truculent disregard of 
authority, principle and law; a flamboyant 
declaration of the right of the free American 
citizen to make his country as ugly as he 
chose; a riot of ignorance, bad taste, ex- 
travagance, and crude independence. 

It must not be forgotten, however, that 
in the darkest days of marble palaces with 
painted iron columns, and of bastard Queen 
Anne cottages rising sanguinary and osten- 
tatious above diminutive lawns, builders who 
were also architects, or architects who were 
also builders, as in the "elder days of art, 5 ' 
were patiently trying to persuade their clients 
that building was an ancient art and not a 
local job ; and that an increasing number of 
those who were teachable in these matters 
made life tolerable in prosperous communities. 
The remnant of the elect increased not only 
o 193 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

in knowledge, but in influence, and the state- 
ment by a well-known architect that Ameri- 
can architecture was the "art of covering 
one thing with another to imitate a third 
thing, which, if genuine, would not be desir- 
able," began to lose point. Upjohn, Ren- 
wick, Hunt, Richardson, Root, and White 
suggest a movement in education, and a gen- 
uine achievement in an art which more than 
any other ought to have in this country a 
hand as free as its opportunity is great. If 
vagaries are still seen in stone, wood, and 
iron, and if the ready adapter and servile 
imitator are still in the land, there are increas- 
ing evidences of the presence of the artist 
and of the patron who is wise enough to give 
him his chance. 

American painting has passed through gray, 
uneventful years, but it has never known a 
reign of terror. 

It is true, the earlier painters were English 
rather than American, and it is also true that 
they did not rank with the best ; but the best, 
it ought to be remembered, were Reynolds 
and Gainsborough. Peale, Copley, and Stuart 

194 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

made places for themselves in the history not 
only of American, but of English, art, though 
their rank in the colonies was much higher 
than in the mother country. To them and 
to their pupils we owe not only a tradition 
of sound workmanship, but a large group of 
portraits which are of immense social and 
historic interest. They were the most 
graphic and vital historians of the older 
American society. It was inevitable that 
they should be English in taste and manner, 
since they were dealing almost entirely with 
English faces at a time when Americans were 
still Englishmen in new surroundings; the 
best service they could render to their con- 
temporaries was to make them familiar with 
good work. Less fortunate artists who be- 
gan by painting signs ended in several cases 
by painting good portraits and miniatures. 
John Wesley Jar vis, who was born in England 
and named after his famous uncle, was taken 
to Philadelphia at an early age, and received 
his education in the irregular manner of a 
country in which the value of art schools was 
a matter of remote future discussion. "In 

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AMERICAN IDEALS 

my school days," he writes, "the painters of 
Philadelphia were Clark, a miniature painter, 
and Galagher, a painter of portraits and 
signs; he was a German who, with his hat 
over one eye, was more au fait at walking 
Chestnut Street than at either face or sign 
painting. Then there was Jeremiah Paul, 
who painted better and would hop farther 
than any of them ; another who painted 
red lions and black bears, as well as beaux 
and belles, was old Mr. Pratt, and the last 
that I remember of that day was Rutter, an 
honest sign-painter, who never pretended or 
aspired to paint the human face divine, 
except to hang on the outside of a house; 
these worthies, when work was plenty, flags 
and fire buckets in demand, used to work 
in partnership, and I, between school hours, 
worked for them all, delighted to have the 
command of a brush and a paint pot. Such 
was my introduction to the fine arts and their 
professors." Copley, West, Stuart, Peale, 
Trumbull, and Allston were court painters 
in ease of condition compared with some of 
their obscure fellow-craftsmen in the coun- 

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THE AMERICAN IN ART 

try; and, taking into account their limita- 
tions of temperament, they were not unequal 
to their opportunities. 

There were commonplace painters between 
the later pupils of West and the generation of 
Kensett, Whittredge, and Gifford ; but neither 
during that period nor later was there a reign 
of terror in American painting; there was, 
on the contrary, a more or less steady gain 
in craftsmanship and originality. Whatever 
may have been the limitations of the group 
of gifted men who are popularly regarded as 
belonging to the Hudson River School, they 
were trained in good traditions, and they 
interpreted the landscape of the country for 
the first time with deep feeling and sympa- 
thetic knowledge. They were men of gener- 
ous and enthusiastic nature, and the breadth 
and wildness of American scenery moved 
them to large artistic endeavors. Their work 
was done out of doors, in a spirit of resolute 
fidelity to what they saw, and with simplicity 
of method. 

If the vastness of scale of American scenery 
appealed to Church and Bierstadt, its poetry 

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AMERICAN IDEALS 

was felt by Inness, Martin, and Wyant, 
in whose work there was an individuality of 
insight and of expression which showed that 
the apprentice period in American painting 
was at an end, and the day of distinctive 
achievement at hand. Mr. Vedder reached 
his majority in 1857, and with him enters the 
element of mystery, the suggestion of fate, 
into American painting. There was nothing 
esoteric in his interpretations of figures and 
faces ; no pretense on the part of the artist 
to the possession of a secret cipher, an occult 
knowledge, which his art implied but did not 
betray; on the contrary, its most potent 
suggestiveness is the feeling it conveys that 
the artist saw and painted something as essen- 
tially unknowable to him as to his most 
intelligent student. When the illustrations 
to the "Rubaiyat" appeared in 1887, Mr. 
Vedder's work was well known by a few 
lovers of art, but that vague and cold col- 
lective person, "the general public," succes- 
sor of the "gentle reader," had no acquaint- 
ance with it. The suggestiveness and power 
of the pictorial interpretation of Omar Khay- 

198 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

yam deeply impressed the imagination of the 
country, not only because the manner was 
novel and the matter in striking contrast to 
the prevailing mood, but because the form 
was at once simple and fundamentally uni- 
fied, and obviously and broadly beautified. 
The work was almost classical in its definite- 
ness, but the richness of its texture, the 
solidity of its presentation, the liberal use of 
emblems and symbols, gave it a quality 
remote from familiar things, and kept the 
painter well in front of the philosopher. In 
the work of Mr. Vedder, as in that of Inness 
and Martin, the imagination began to move 
along original lines and to disclose a fresh 
and powerful impulse. 

In 1862 William Morris Hunt settled in 
Boston, and began a career which was too 
short to fulfill the hopes it awakened. If 
there was something lacking in mastery of tech- 
nique, there was, in "The Bathers," in "The 
Boy and the Butterfly," in the decorations 
which gave distinction to the Albany Capitol 
and were sacrificed, — as art always is when 
it is innocently involved in a political job, 

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AMERICAN IDEALS 

— and in many of the portraits, a rich lan- 
guage of temperament, a luminousness, a 
command of tones full of ardor and passion, 
which revealed the presence of a genius trained 
in the Old but reveling in the freedom and 
audacity of the New World. 

Whistler and La Farge came of age a little 
later, and, in very diverse ways, exhibited 
that happy coining together of genius and 
culture which precedes fertility of high-class 
work in all the arts, and which, in the case 
of these two painters, gave American painting 
secure place in the critical opinion of the 
world. The work of both craftsmen was 
saturated with feeling, with personality of 
rare quality, and irradiated again and again 
by the magic of inspiration. Mr. La Farge 
has so lately gone from us, but the complete- 
ness of the disclosure of his gifts in the com- 
paratively small mass of his work makes it 
proper to speak of it as a rounded achieve- 
ment. It may be said of him with safety, 
as of Whistler, that he has never sacrificed 
art to any kind of expediency, nor shaped 
his work to any passing interests; but with 

200 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

the unswerving fidelity of a man of deep artis- 
tic instincts, he served his country by regard- 
ing not what it craved, but what alone could 
finally satisfy it. The note of distinction 
in his work, as in that of Whistler and of a 
considerable group of younger painters, has 
been an immense consolation to those who 
have feared that the price for the obvious 
material comforts of democracy might be a 
loss of fineness of feeling, of a certain eleva- 
tion, dignity and superiority of ideal and 
manner which have always been present in 
the greater achievements of art. 

Whistler published the Normandy etchings 
in 1858 ; four or five years later his portraits 
of his mother and of Carlyle appeared, to 
be followed in the next decade by the incom- 
parable etchings of Venice, of the Thames, 
of glimpses of the sea, of those odds and ends 
of buildings whose decay the twilight or the 
distance touched with a charm incommuni- 
cable by a hand less sensitive, subtle, and 
sure. Against an English background the 
audacity and brilliancy of Whistler's mind 
and temperament, his amazing skill in the 

201 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

dialects of verbal warfare, the flash and sting 
of his repartee, were immensely heightened, 
and prove him the alien he always claimed to 
be. His skill in expression was little short of 
magical ; and if, in the dispassionate judgment 
of his work by future generations, it shall 
seem to lack fundamental power, there can 
be no skepticism touching its beauty, subt- 
lety, delicacy, — the specific qualities which 
many critics have agreed must perish under 
the blight of democracy. 

American painting had ceased to be iso- 
lated and provincial long before the United 
States had been forced out of a seclusion from 
the affairs of the world, which it cherished as 
an historic policy after the conditions of 
modern civilization had entirely changed, and 
the endeavor to separate privilege from re- 
sponsibility had become as futile as it was 
selfish. Men whose work bears the marks of 
locality as distinctly as that of Eastman 
Johnson and Winslow Homer; of personal 
idealism, ascending at times to the height of 
vision, as that of Fuller among the older, and 
Thayer among the younger, men; of bril- 

202 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

liant and audacious character-reading and 
brush work, as that of Sargent; of forceful 
or charming individuality of observation of 
nature and of the human face, as that of 
Tyron, Brown, Foster, Brush, Walker, Beck- 
with, Alexander, Cecilia Beaux, — to select 
a few among many representative names, — 
by a common sincerity of feeling, by great 
diversity of gifts, and by high seriousness of 
spirit, emancipated American painting from 
provincial tastes, local standards, and na- 
tional complacency. 

Fifty years ago, American sculpture was 
a matter of a few names, a few pieces of 
well-cut marble, and a considerable mass 
of pretty and meaningless reminiscences of 
Italian ateliers. Ignorance of the art was 
widespread, and where ignorance ended prej- 
udice began. There was a chilling suspicion 
of the decency of sculpture, and the unhappy 
artist who hinted at the existence of the 
human form under clothes was regarded as 
a dealer in immorality. In Philadelphia, 
in 1845, a few casts from the antique created 
something very like a public scandal ; and 

203 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

when, at an earlier period, Greenough's 
"Chanting Cherubs," the first group by an 
American sculptor, was exhibited, a storm 
of condemnation enveloped the undraped 
figures ; nude babies were familiar in Ameri- 
can homes, but their appearance in public 
shocked the moral sense of the whole com- 
munity. This was in New York, where, in 
early times, gentlemen who profited by piracy 
had been influential members of society. 
The symbolism of Powers's "Greek Slave," 
and the passionate sympathy with the Greek 
struggle for freedom, diverted attention from 
the nudity of the figure to the pathos it ex- 
pressed ; but it was thought necessary, in 
the interests of public morals, that the fair 
captive should be examined by a committee 
of experts. Accordingly, a group of clergy- 
men in Cincinnati sat as a jury and, after a 
critical examination of the figure, issued a 
kind of license for purposes of public exhibi- 
tion. The humor of submitting the statue 
to the inspection of a committee of clergy- 
men does not seem to have occurred to any 
save a few Americans who had been cor- 

204 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

rupted by familiarity with foreign galleries ; 
nor does any one appear to have realized that 
the real immorality was not in the timid 
innocent slave, but in the public opinion 
which hailed her effigy as the greatest work of 
art in the history of the world. 

These significant facts explain the eager 
haste with which Greenough, Powers, and 
Crawford fled to Italy and remained in that 
more genial clime. The sin of self -conscious- 
ness which made Americans blush when the 
human form was mentioned in polite conver- 
sation, the lack of public interest, the dense 
ignorance of public taste, and the absence of 
examples of the art and of fine marble, drove 
the little group of sculptors into lifelong exile. 
Houdon, the Frenchman, and Cerrachi, 
the Italian, had done some interesting work 
in this country; Rush and Augur had been 
timidly prophetic in wood and stone ; there 
were Italian carvings in some of the colonial 
homes ; but it was still very early dawn in 
American sculpture when Greenough, Powers, 
and Crawford became professional sculptors. 
Greenough and Crawford, despite the un- 

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AMERICAN IDEALS 

evenness of their work and their partial suc- 
cess in large undertakings, made contribu- 
tions of lasting artistic and historical value 
to the art which they practiced with passion- 
ate fidelity. Powers lacked temperament, 
vigor, the creative imagination ; he never 
escaped the trammels of the Italian tradi- 
tion and set his hand boldly and strongly 
to original work ; but he carved some admi- 
rable portrait busts, full of character, firm in 
manner, and faithful in likeness. 

How far the country had yet to go in under- 
standing and appreciation of sculpture is 
brought out by the fact that in 1862 the 
National Congress commissioned a girl of 
fifteen, after an education in her art which 
lasted a twelvemonth, to execute a statue 
of Lincoln, which now stands in the rotunda 
of the Capitol at Washington, among other 
effigies of departed statesmen whose enforced 
absence alone secures the safety of the col- 
lection. In that melancholy hour the country 
was standing, however, on the threshold of 
that day of free and varied creativeness which 
has given contemporary American sculpture 

206 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

a place of the first importance in the interest 
of the artistic world. In no art was there for 
the first seventy years of the national life so 
little promise ; in none has there been so 
great an achievement. 

In 1857, Mr. Ward first modeled his Indian 
Hunter, which now stands, alert, alive, con- 
vincing, set low as if gliding through the 
shadows, in the foliage of New York's beauti- 
ful park. Eleven years later Saint Gaudens, 
whose death fell like a shadow over the 
awakening love of beauty in America, re- 
ceived the commission for the statue of 
Farragut, which put him at the forefront of 
American sculptors, and made an immediate 
impression on monumental art in the country. 
No figure set up in any public place in America 
has spoken with such simplicity and human- 
ness of speech to the mighty tides that stream 
past it on the most crowded of American 
thoroughfares, nor has any more distinctly 
given a fresh and invigorating impulse to an 
art but lately emancipated from foreign influ- 
ence and timidly venturing to give its soul 
play. The Lincoln in the Chicago Park 

207 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

which bears its name has been accepted as 
the foremost portrait statue in the New 
World ; the beautiful and baffling figure in 
the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, 
clothed with majesty of the mystery of 
death ; the Shaw Memorial in Boston, with 
its moving column of negro soldiers fast 
upon the leader who rides, young and im- 
mortal, into the ranks of the dead ; and, 
finally, the superb Sherman Memorial at one 
of the entrances to Central Park, New York, 
held securely on its pedestal, but moving, 
invincible, and alive, like its great fellow in 
Venice : these are achievements to be reck- 
oned with, not only as forming an inspiring 
chapter in the development of American 
sculpture, but as a lasting contribution to 
the art of the world. What a distance these 
works register from tentative work of the 
earlier sculptors ; from Palmer's charming 
ideal heads, and those graceful figures which 
did so much to awaken popular interest in 
sculpture ; from Ball's impressive monumental 
work; from the varied and cultivated crea- 
tions of Story, that fascinating and many- 

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THE AMERICAN IN ART 

sided American, whose life was so full of 
interest and occupation, and who was fluent 
in so many languages of art that nothing he 
accomplished quite expressed his vitality or 
fulfilled his promise ! 

The fine poise and noble serenity of Mr. 
French's work, in which the skill of the 
craftsman and the power of revealing beauty 
and strength to men untrained in art, are 
happily united ; the virile audacity and bold- 
ness of Mr. Macmonnies; the striking and 
forceful originality of Mr. Barnard; Mr. 
Bartlett's "Lafayette," with its indefinable air 
of distinction, and his "Genius of Man" at the 
Pan-American Exposition ; Mr. Boyle's "Stone 
Age," in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia ; Mr. 
Adams's gracious and unfailingly fascinating 
portrait busts ; Mr. El well's figures of "Ceres" 
and "Kronos" at the Buffalo Exposition ; Mr. 
Ruckstuhl's strongly conceived "Spirit of the 
Confederacy " ; Mr. Partridge's meditative 
study of Tennyson; Mr. MacNeil's "Sun 
Vow"; Mr. Lopez's "Sprinter"; Mr. Pratt's 
"Andersonville Prisoner Boy"; Mr. Dallin's 
"Signal of Peace" ; Mr. Bringhurst's "Kiss of 
p 209 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

Eternity" ; Mr. Taft's " Solitude of the Soul" 
— to select a few representative works out of 
a great multitude — show how far the art of 
sculpture has gone in mastery of tools, cour- 
age of individual taste, variety and freshness 
of manner and subject, since the days when 
Greenough, Powers, Crawford, and Story 
found in Italy a refuge from the ignorance and 
indifference of their fellow countrymen. 

The record of the progress of music has 
not been unlike that of sculpture. If it 
could be recalled in baldest outline, touching 
only its points of new departure, it would 
show the same general features. It was, for 
obvious reasons, more widely appreciated in 
the earlier times than sculpture, but its 
intelligent students were comparatively few, 
in spite of the fact that the old-fashioned 
schools for young women placed the study of 
music side by side with needlework, "elegant 
deportment and polite conversation." There 
was a great deal of that kind of music which 
Dumas called "the most expensive form of 
noise." A musical people could not and 
would not have accepted the "Star-Spangled 

210 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

Banner," with its terrible interrogatory "Oh, 
say," as a national anthem. There were 
homes, and even communities, in which sing- 
ing and instrumental music were matters of 
taste and skill as well as of heart; but the 
country at large was a barren wilderness so 
far as the "concourse of sweet sounds" was 
concerned. To-day, in many large cities, it 
is impossible to make use of musical oppor- 
tunities, so many and so interesting are they. 
In no art has there been so rapid and so wide 
a growth of intelligent interest during the 
last fifty years. In nearly all the large cities 
orchestras of thorough training are to be 
heard, and permanent organizations of highly 
educated musicians are fast becoming a fea- 
ture of life in the large centers. New York 
has long been devoted to grand opera, and 
musical programs of every sort and kind 
are rendered to crowded audiences. It is 
true, all the other cities in the country are 
agreed that this musical interest is a fad, 
but it is equally true that it is so persistent 
and discriminating that it deceives the elect 
leaders of the Old World who conduct the 

211 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

New York orchestras from time to time, and 
are deluded into the belief that the me- 
tropolis is a musical city. Boston listens, 
without impeachment of her intelligence, 
to her admirable orchestras, and educates 
an almost innumerable host of students in 
music. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, 
Cincinnati, have the most substantial claims 
to consideration as centers of interest in musi- 
cal matters ; while the growing enthusiasm 
for musical festivals in Worcester, Montclair, 
Bethlehem and other communities may be 
safely taken as indicative of a steadily widen- 
ing area of knowledge and appreciation. 
Music is taught in some of the older colleges 
by teachers who are also composers, while in 
the young and vigorous institutions of the 
Central West the love of the art is a popular 
movement. 

Side by side with an immense amount of 
vulgarity in sound, of hideous "ragtime" 
profanity, there is a growing critical sense 
in music. Stephen Foster's touch on the 
springs of emotion in "The Old Kentucky 
Home," "Old Folks at Home," "Nellie was 



THE AMERICAN IN ART 

a Lady," and other melodies which the whole 
continent sang or hummed sixty years ago, 
was a prelude to a very considerable produc- 
tion of popular music, lacking in classical 
quality, but with a certain naive originality 
and significance in our musical development, 
as Dvorak was quick to see when he composed 
the New World Symphony. Such teachers as 
Professors Paine and Parker, who have been 
creators in the field in which they have long 
been conspicuous leaders in thoroughness of 
education ; such composers as MacDowell, 
Chadwick, Hadley, Foote, Kelly, and Con- 
verse, and such conductors as Thomas, the 
elder Damrosch, Seidl, and Gericke, have 
brought Americans out of the desert of the 
mediocre and cheap in an art which has, 
perhaps more than any other, given freest 
and deepest expression to the modern temper 
a'nd attitude, into a land of abundant and 
increasing fertility and refreshment. 



215 



vin 

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

The most eminent student of American 
life has said that the passion of the American 
is not for money, as many other observers have 
declared, but for education. The popular be- 
lief in its moral and political efficacy is a 
fundamental conviction and has developed an 
unprecedented generosity from legislatures and 
from private donors. Respect for scholarship 
came to America with the first settlers, though 
all the colonies did not attach the same im- 
portance to education. In England, Scotland 
and Holland the school, which had been the 
adjunct of the church and in a special sense 
the teacher of priests, did not cease to be re- 
ligious when the Protestants came into power ; 
on the contrary, they regarded education 
as their most important ally. When the peo- 
ple of Leyden, after one of the most heroic 
sieges in history, were offered by William of 
214 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

Orange perpetual remission of taxes, they 
asked that they might have a university ; the 
Puritan movement in England was led largely 
by men who had studied at Cambridge, and 
the Puritan faith in education as the bulwark 
of religion went to New England with the 
earliest colonists and made that section a 
mother of colleges and a teacher of teachers. 
The Virginia Company had no sooner set 
foot on the banks of the James River for com- 
mercial purposes than it set apart a large 
section of land for the use of a college to 
teach Indian children the rudiments of Chris- 
tianity and of the Latin language, and money 
was collected in England to establish a school 
which should prepare children for this col- 
lege. The failure of the company a few years 
later defeated these plans, but they reveal 
the mind of the men who were behind the 
enterprise. Conditions in Virginia were not 
favorable to popular education, but free 
schools were established here and there in 
the colony in the first half century of its 
history. Small private schools came into 
existence wherever there were groups of set- 

215 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

tiers ; while the planters, who were becoming 
prosperous, provided private tutors for their 
children. 

In New England preaching was a function 
of the very highest importance and preachers 
were leaders in public affairs; the educa- 
tion of preachers was, therefore, one of the 
matters to which the Puritan colonists gave 
earliest attention. They accepted the bur- 
den of supporting these schools as a public 
duty, and the maintenance of education by 
taxation became axiomatic while the feeble 
settlers were still fighting to keep standing- 
ground on the edge of the continent. In 
1642, twenty-two years after the landing at 
Plymouth, Massachusetts ordained by law 
that every child should be taught "to read 
and understand the principles of religion and 
the capital laws of the country." This ordi- 
nance, narrow in conception but of immense 
capacity for future development, was the in- 
itial step in the evolution of the system of 
public education at public expense which has 
become one of the most characteristic features 
of American life. A little later, in the same 

216 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

section, every township, when it numbered 
fifty householders, was required to support a 
teacher; and towns numbering a hundred 
householders, to establish a school to teach 
Latin. These schools were often feeble and 
ineffective, but the little local schools with a 
single teacher traveled with the settlements. 
They were rude pioneer experiments, for the 
conditions which surrounded them were rude ; 
their importance lay in the fact that they 
gave education a first place in public interest 
and accustomed people to think of educa- 
tion as a function of the community. 

Nor did the interest of the colonist ex- 
haust itself in establishing a rudimentary 
system of public education. In 1635, fifteen 
years after the landing of the first New Eng- 
land colony, the Boston Latin School was 
opened; an institution modeled after the 
English Grammar School, with which many of 
the colonists were familiar. This school re- 
mains to-day one of the best -known schools in 
America. Three years later, by the generos- 
ity of John Harvard, the first of the long 
line of American founders of colleges, Har- 

217 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

vard College was opened for students ; an in- 
stitution which has long held a first place 
by reason, not so much of its age as of its 
success in training men of distinction, and 
its leadership in educational adaptation and 
experiment. Yale College, in the New Haven 
colony, was chartered in 1701 ; in 1691 a 
college had been established in Williamsburg, 
the capital of Virginia. William and Mary 
College owed its original endowment to pri- 
vate donors, to the English king and queen 
after whom it was named and who bestowed on 
it large tracts of unoccupied lands, and to 
the Virginia Assembly, which set apart for its 
support the proceeds of a specific import 
duty. But the college owed more to the stub- 
born determination of James Blair, a colonist 
from Scotland, than to any other person. He 
aroused the interest of the English sovereigns 
and of many prominent people in England in 
the proposed college. When he urged the 
need of it for the sake of the souls of the 
colonists on the Attorney-General, that im- 
portant officer of the Crown said, irritably : 
" Damn your souls, make tobacco!" This 

-218 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

sentence puts into a few forcible words the 
attitude towards the colonies which led to the 
disruption of their relations to the mother 
country. It was a picturesque statement of 
the colonial policy of the time when the use of 
colonies for revenue purposes was the chief 
concern of the home governments. 

Virginia had a great share in the War of 
the Revolution and in the formation of the 
American government. In Washington she 
gave the colonists a leader who commanded 
their armies through the long and exhausting 
eight years' war, who became the first Presi- 
dent and who remains the foremost American ; 
and Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Dec- 
laration of Independence, became the third 
President and defined the theory of the 
powers of the National government which 
has been held by one of the great political 
parties from the adoption of the Constitution. 
It is significant of the spirit of the founders 
of the American state that Washington, who 
had served through the war not only without 
compensation but paid his own expenses, made 
a generous bequest in his last will and testa- 

219 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

ment for the founding of a national uni- 
versity; while Jefferson, who was strongly 
influenced by French thought, founded the 
University of Virginia in 1825. The other 
colleges, with the exception of Princeton, — 
which showed the influence of the Scotch 
universities, — were modeled largely on Eng- 
lish college lines. The University of Virginia 
embodied French ideals and methods. It 
was distinctly a secular institution, while 
the other colleges were still more or less under 
the control of the different Christian churches, 
and their students received distinctive reli- 
gious teaching in one form or another. 

Education was not only a prime public 
interest in colonial America, but has become 
the chief interest in national America, which 
has moved steadily though often instinctively 
to the conviction that access to knowledge is 
not only a guarantee of popular government, 
but the supreme duty of such a government 
and the right of all its citizens. There is a 
national system of education in the United 
States, though there is no national control 
of education. In all the States education 

220 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

is provided for children at public expense; 
but the methods, extent and standards of this 
education are entirely within the control of 
the individual States. In a few States free 
education is not provided beyond the common 
school ; in the majority of the States it is 
continued through the High School ; in many 
States, especially in the West, it is con- 
tinued through the university. The common 
school, open to all children everywhere, is 
the base of this system. In 1911 there were 
17,813,853 pupils in such schools in the 
United States, and the forty-eight States paid 
for their support $426,250,434 ; a sum which 
exceeds one third of the annual expenditure 
of the National government, and more than 
doubles the expenditure of all the States for 
all other purposes ; this sum being raised en- 
tirely by direct taxation on the localities 
which sustain the schools. These schools 
are under the general direction of local 
school boards elected by the voters of the 
district or of the town. 

To these common schools supported by 
taxation must be added a multitude of schools 

Ml 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

supported by the various religious organiza- 
tions, many of which are of high rank. The 
Roman Catholic Church has a widely extended 
system of parish schools in which more than a 
million children are taught. There are also 
several thousand schools conducted as private 
enterprises, often thoroughly equipped and 
beautifully housed. In many cities the kin- 
dergartens in the public schools are supple- 
mented by kindergartens supported by in- 
dividuals or by associations of private persons, 
who not only believe in the Froebelian ideas 
and methods of education for all young chil- 
dren but are convinced that the kindergarten 
is specially adapted to meet the needs of 
children in the congested quarters of large 
cities and in factory towns. The national 
government maintains a number of schools 
for Indian children, as a temporary expedient. 
And a large group of schools for negro chil- 
dren is supported by private means at points 
where the need of immediate education is 
pressing and the burden too heavy for local 
resources. Large gifts of land for educational 
purposes were made to the States when the 

222 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

National government had great unoccupied 
tracts at its disposal, and it maintains a 
Military Academy and a Naval Academy of 
high rank. 

It will be seen that the National govern- 
ment does not support the educational sys- 
tem of the country because, in the division 
of functions, that function is discharged by 
the States. Within the last few years a 
National Bureau of Education has been estab- 
lished at Washington under the direction of 
the Commissioner of Education, but its work 
is not executive; it collects and formulates 
the statistics of education in all parts of 
the country and the information which it 
gathers and arranges is at the disposal of 
the country. The Commissioner is a non- 
political officer of the government and is 
chosen for his educational knowledge and 
executive ability. He has little direct au- 
thority but great influence, and that in- 
fluence is likely to increase as the need of 
greater uniformity of standards and methods 
becomes more pressing with the extension 
of the school system. 

223 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

A child in an American community which 
provides kindergartens enters the kindergar- 
ten at the age of four and the primary depart- 
ment of the common school of the district at 
six or seven. In this school he remains un- 
til his fourteenth year and is taught the 
rudiments — reading, writing, arithmetic, 
literature and science. In many schools pro- 
vision is made for manual training and for 
the beginning of education in the trades. 
From his fourteenth to his eighteenth year, 
speaking generally, he is in the High School, 
where he pursues the same subjects in more 
advanced classes; adding to them, if he in- 
tends to go through college, special studies 
in the languages, history and science pre- 
paratory to his college work; or, if he pro- 
poses to enter the field of business, courses 
in mathematics, bookkeeping, accounts, cur- 
rency and kindred subjects. Of late years the 
High School has been one of the chief centers 
of interest in the field of education. Its 
courses of studies have been greatly extended 
and its standards raised. The young men who 
enter Harvard by way of the High School have 

9m 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

made an exceptionally high record in their 
entrance examinations. 

There is a small group of endowed prepara- 
tory schools for boys ; some of which, like 
the academies at Exeter and Andover, are 
of early origin ; others, like St. Paul's, Law- 
renceville, Groton, the Hill School, the Mer- 
cersberg Academy, are of later creation. 
These schools, which fill in the United States 
the place taken by Eton, Harrow, Rugby and 
other well-known public schools in England, 
are generously endowed, handsomely housed, 
and have behind them a growing body of 
graduates devoted to their interest. 

Increasing numbers of American youth 
are prepared for college, however, in the 
High Schools. These schools have become, 
moreover, social centers in the smaller towns 
and in the larger and more widely scattered 
communities. They bring together boys and 
girls from country homes and rural hamlets, 
and no small part of the education they fur- 
nish is in the broadening of ideas and inter- 
ests through this wider intercourse. There 
is a growing feeling that the fine, spacious 
* 225 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and often beautiful buildings devoted to pub- 
lic education have larger uses for the com- 
munity than they have yet served; night 
schools have long been established in the 
city school buildings and popular lectures 
on serious subjects are given in their assem- 
bly rooms. In some communities there is a 
growing disposition to place the school build- 
ings more generally in the hands of the people 
for meetings called to discuss public ques- 
tions or to take action on public matters. 
At seventeen or eighteen the boy enters 
college and, if he takes the full college course, 
spends four years in further study of the 
languages, of mathematics, history, philos- 
ophy, science in its various departments, 
economics in its greatly broadened scope. 
Until a generation ago the course of study 
in the different colleges was practically iden- 
tical so far as subjects were concerned ; there 
were four classes, sometimes subdivided for 
the sake of efficiency, and each class fol- 
lowed a fixed course in the Humanities, in 
Philosophy, Mathematics and the principles 
of Science. The course was sharply defined 

226 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

and every student was compelled to conform 
to its requirements. There was then a per- 
fectly defined and widely accepted conception 
of the college as an institution for the general 
education of youth on broad lines of liberal 
culture ; an attempt to put into practice the 
definition of education formulated by Bishop 
Comenius : "to train generally all who are 
born men for all which is human." 

The American college was the culmina- 
tion of a course of education devised to train 
the boy as a general force before preparing 
him for specific uses of that force; to make 
him familiar with the history of thought, 
and with classical literature; to give him 
sound habits of thought and a general view of 
the physical world through a knowledge of the 
principles of Science. The word culture de- 
fined perhaps as accurately as a single word 
can define the older college ideal in America 
and described the quality which it developed 
in the best students. It was a literary rather 
than a scientific education, and reflected, 
with modifications, the English university 
ideals by which all the early colleges, except 

227 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the University of Virginia, were deeply in- 
fluenced. It sent out men of culture rather 
than men of thorough training ; technical and 
professional education was provided by the 
universities and technical schools and fol- 
lowed at the end of the college course. Lowell, 
one of the finest examples of the generous cul- 
ture of the old-time college, put the college 
ideal in somewhat exaggerated form in the 
declaration that a college should teach nothing 
useful ; nothing, that is, which a man turns to 
account in earning a living. The college 
was supposed to help a man "make his soul" 
— to borrow a French phrase ; the special 
training which came later taught him to make 
his living. 

But radical changes of general conditions 
have greatly modified and extended the 
older college curriculum. The development 
of the sciences has compelled the introduc- 
tion of departments, of subdivisions of 
classes, of extended laboratory facilities; 
and the spread of scientific ideas and the 
immensely widened uses of science have put 
scientific interests in the forefront of the 

228 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

higher education and, in a great number of in- 
stitutions, revolutionized both the subjects 
and the methods of college training. 

Formerly the majority of American youth 
looked forward to one of three professions, 
the law, medicine or theology. These were 
called the "learned professions," because it 
was recognized that special training was of 
high importance in their practice. Now there 
are more than a hundred professions which 
demand technical training on the part of their 
practitioners ; and engineering, which only 
a few men formerly chose for their life work, 
now has not only its own schools in connec- 
tion with the older universities but has called 
into existence a large number of institutions 
of high rank devoted entirely to its own educa- 
tional work. 

Formerly, before the relations between 
business and science had been recognized — 
and in this respect Japan and Germany are 
far in the lead — the youth who intended to 
enter into any form of commercial life learned 
his work by entering an established business 
house and working his way up from the bottom. 

229 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

Not only was he not expected to bring a col- 
lege training to his task, but such a training 
was regarded as a hindrance to his success ; 
it brought him too late into the field and it 
gave him ideas, habits and tastes which 
were of no practical service. Men of busi- 
ness regarded the college as useful in prepar- 
ing men for the professions, but as unneces- 
sary if not a hindrance to success in dealing 
with practical affairs. But competition with 
countries in which business is as much a 
profession as the Law or Medicine or Diplo- 
macy, and the steadily advancing standards 
of efficiency in all fields of endeavor, have 
compelled the reorganization of the methods 
of higher education. The heads of great 
manufacturing organizations have learned that 
a main source of profit lies in the skill of the 
chemist, and that the laboratories of the 
universities hold the success of the factories 
in their hands; and it has become difficult 
to keep promising young chemists in the field 
of original research because business offers 
such glittering prizes and such rapid advance- 
ment. 

230 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

The immense development of the means 
of transportation has opened another field of 
endeavor to trained men, and service in the 
various scientific departments of the govern- 
ment still another field. Farming is put on 
a scientific basis, and a large number of 
schools and colleges of agriculture have come 
into existence. 

These new demands on education have 
been met in the college curriculum as well as 
in the development of universities and techni- 
cal schools. The colleges which still hold 
to the older ideal of education as a discipline 
to secure culture have responded by enlarg- 
ing and equipping their facilities for the study 
of science. But the great majority of colleges 
have gone much further : they have pro- 
vided a very wide range of studies, and given 
their students, under certain restrictions, the 
privilege of electing which road they will 
take to obtain the degree which becomes more 
and more necessary to the man who hopes 
for preferment in any profession or occupa- 
tion that demands the knowledge of the 
expert. 

231 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

The elective system has now been tested by 
the experience of a generation; and while it 
has been modified so as to secure a certain 
logical order and a certain coordination of 
studies, it has permanently established itself 
in many colleges. Scientific and humanistic 
courses run parallel with one another through 
the four years and lead to degrees in science 
or in art as the case may be. This involves 
the subdivision of classes into small groups, 
the enlargement of faculties, the extension of 
equipment to include laboratories, depart- 
mental libraries, rooms for the seminar, for 
apparatus of many kinds ; and all these things 
have added enormously to the expense of edu- 
cation. 

It has been found necessary, moreover, 
to provide for those young men who cannot 
command the time and money necessary for 
both college and university training but to 
whom the degree in Law, Medicine, Engineer- 
ing, Pedagogy, Theology is essential. If a 
man takes the full college course he graduates, 
as a rule, at twenty-two years of age and 
still has three or four years of work in the 

232 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

Medical, Law, Theological or Technical school 
before he can begin his work in life. In 
other words, he cannot begin to earn his own 
living until he is twenty-five or twenty-six 
years of age. It is true very large endow- 
ments in the hands of the colleges provide 
aid for an army of students who cannot meet 
all their expenses ; and many colleges, espe- 
cially those in cities, provide the student 
with facilities for earning money in ways 
which do not conflict with academic duties. 
But there are many students who cannot post- 
pone self-support so late; and some colleges 
have responded to their needs by furnishing 
opportunities for professional and technical 
education during the last two years of the 
college course, counting the work done in 
these years in the sum total of required work 
for the coveted degree which opens the doors 
of the several professions. By this means 
the time of preparation is reduced one or two 
years. But there is a strong feeling in fa- 
vor of the full course whenever conditions 
permit. 

In a number of colleges the elective system 
233 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

exists in the modified form of the group sys- 
tem; and students are offered, not a free 
choice of a wide range of unrelated studies, 
but of groups of studies so arranged as to 
cover various fields and to provide a fairly 
consistent and logical scheme of general 
education. Even in colleges which provide 
most generously for elective students it has 
been found necessary to place incoming 
students under the influence of experienced 
advisers in making their initial choice of 
subjects and to require certain definite at- 
tainments for a degree. 

The student instinct for choosing easy, 
or, in the student slang, "snap," courses has 
also been put under police regulation, so to 
speak. In a word, the endeavor has been 
made to protect the undergraduate from his 
own inexperience in planning his college course, 
to secure from him at least a respectable 
amount of work, and to make sure that he gets 
a fairly comprehensive view of the field of 
knowledge. 

Very broad contrasts are offered therefore 
by the American college; in many insti- 

234 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

tutions the students still pursue through 
four years the beaten paths in Latin, Greek, 
History, Philosophy, Literature, Natural Sci- 
ence and Mathematics ; in other institutions, 
of which Harvard may serve as an example, 
the field of knowledge is traversed by paths so 
many as to bewilder the Freshman who is 
eager to make the best use of his opportunities. 
It is said that a man could not take all the 
courses offered at Harvard in two hundred 
years. Every student is required to study 
English composition ; beyond this very modest 
requirement the whole field is practically 
open to him. The Harvard system, which has 
been somewhat modified, is the ultimate ex- 
pression of New England individualism in edu- 
cation. It is reported that in a certain 
university of recent creation the President, 
a man of notable scholarship and unappeasable 
energy, was waited upon one morning by a 
young man who wished to study Choctaw, a 
vanishing Indian dialect. "We have no de- 
partment for the teaching of Choctaw this 
morning," said the head of the university, 
"but if you will be good enough to call again 

235 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

this afternoon we will organize one for 
you." 

There are no stories which bring us nearer 
to the American spirit than the stories of 
patient self-denial and self-sacrifice of parents 
in order that their children may be educated. 
To bring together the sum necessary for this 
purpose the father and mother will strip 
their lives of every comfort and pleasure. 

Fifty years ago it was the boy who filled the 
foreground of hope and ambition; but for a 
generation the girl has stood beside him. She 
looks forward to a college course as confi- 
dently as her brother ; and for her it has be- 
come as necessary if she is to enter the pro- 
fession which has long been open to women in 
America, teaching. But the vast majority of 
girls who take the college course are not and 
do not expect to become self-supporting. 
They come from well-to-do homes; they are 
the children of professional men, of the leading 
officers of the government, of men of large 
means ; as well as of teachers on small salaries, 
of farmers on small farms, and of village shop- 
keepers. The college woman has long ceased 

236 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

to be a marked person ; she is taken for 
granted in every community ; and she is fore- 
most in all kinds of good work. Colleges for 
women have come into existence in all parts 
of the country ; many of them well endowed, 
amply and often nobly housed, and offering 
courses which parallel the courses in the col- 
leges for men and lead to the same degrees 
upon almost identical conditions. Vassar Col- 
lege, founded in 1865, led the way in providing 
for the higher education of women and remains 
in the forefront ; but Smith, Bryn Mawr, Mt. 
Holyoke, Radcliffe, Wells, Wellesley and other 
institutions of high rank have come into being 
in response to an ever- widening demand ; and 
to-day one of the most serious problems which 
colleges for women face is the overtaxing of 
their facilities for housing and teaching an 
army of eager girls. 

While college education for women was in 
the experimental stage, the courses closely 
paralleled those in colleges for men; but 
college training for women has demonstrated 
its usefulness and is as much a part of the 
American system as college training for men, 

237 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and a distinct differentiation of educational 
material and method is taking place ; the 
colleges for women giving increasing attention 
to science as applied to the home, to sanita- 
tion, to the chemistry of foods and to house- 
hold economics. That line of cleavage will 
become more apparent as time goes on, and 
the college will apply science to home making 
and home keeping as it applies science to 
the various occupations in which men are 
engaged. 

The influence of the English university on 
the American college is seen in the great im- 
portance attached to physical well-being in 
the various forms of sport. Americans were 
slow to follow the mother country in its de- 
votion to sport, but during the last quarter 
of a century they have developed a love of 
athletics which has created a different at- 
mosphere, not only in the colleges but in the 
country. It is often said in Europe that 
Americans are absorbed in business; but no 
one can read the long, detailed and technical 
reports of sports by land and water, which 
are as much a feature of the daily newspaper 

238 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

in America as cable dispatches from Tokyo, 
Paris, Berlin or London, without recognizing 
the keen and well-nigh universal interest in 
these matters. Nor can any one see the 
crowds that hang breathless on the issue of 
games of baseball and football, or hear the 
thunder of the cheers that roll in great waves 
across hotly combatted college fields, with- 
out sharing the eagerness of spirit with which 
Americans play as well as work. Save in 
pioneering and agricultural districts, Ameri- 
cans were once an indoors people; they are 
now an out-of-doors people, proficient not 
only in sport of all kinds but finding keen de- 
light in the life of the woods and in the open 
air. 

For many years the growing interest in 
athletics among students was looked upon 
with apprehension by men bred in the older 
college traditions, and there has been some 
ground for that apprehension. Too much 
time has been devoted to athletics, the per- 
spective of values has been distorted, and the 
heroes of the undergraduate world have been 
not the winners of the prizes in intellectual 

239 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

contests but the champion kicker and quarter- 
back, the pitcher and batter who play base- 
ball with the precision of the great billiard 
experts. The intercollegiate contests have 
brought in a keen competitive spirit and laid 
too great a burden of business management 
on undergraduates. At the annual football 
contest between Yale and Harvard forty 
thousand people are often present, the money 
received for admissions at the gates exceeds 
seventy-five thousand dollars. The univer- 
sity has a stadium which seats thirty-eight 
thousand spectators. 

The evils of excessive devotion to athletics 
are being remedied; its benefits are many 
and great. The games are fundamentally 
educational ; many who visit Oxford and 
Cambridge in the spring and early summer 
and find the student body on the fields and 
the river do not realize that these sports, 
pursued in the amateur spirit, are as valuable 
a feature of university training as the work 
done in the lecture rooms and the laboratory. 
They make men of great physical vigor and 
endurance, of vigorous will and ability to 

240 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

gain or lose with equal steadiness. Much 
of the organizing power and the unyielding 
courage which have made the English name 
respected at the ends of the earth were de- 
veloped on the fields of the Public Schools 
and of the Universities which have trained 
the leaders of the state at home and abroad. 

Physical training of scientific thoroughness 
is a feature of the American college and has a 
place in the educational system almost as im- 
portant as that which the Greeks gave it. 
Lacking the artistic sense which made Greek 
athletics sculpturesque, American athletics 
have raised the moral standards of the under- 
graduate community by supplying legitimate 
channels for the overflowing energies of youth, 
by teaching the laws of health, and by defining 
manly ideals of life. In Yale University, 
which has long been a leader in college ath- 
letics, there is a phrase which expresses what is 
called the Yale spirit: "fair play and team 
play." This phrase means that in all con- 
tests the game shall be played according to 
the rules and that the players shall so sub- 
ordinate themselves that the team shall play 
> 241 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

as one man. No country has been more 
fortunate than Japan in the training of a 
thousand years in "team play," nor has any 
ever given a more striking demonstration of 
its effectiveness. The members of the base- 
ball and football teams in American colleges 
submit to rules of living far more rigid than 
those which govern the army, and to a dis- 
cipline in subordination and obedience not 
less exacting. The games have become largely 
contests of skill; they are won by strategy, 
by signals for which every man waits, and 
by the devotion which capitalizes the total 
strength and skill of a group of men and 
directs them as a commander directs his 
troops when the battle is at its crisis. 

The vital interest which students take in 
athletics is one of the various forms through 
which the college community expresses it- 
self; for in the American college the curric- 
ulum and the scheme of training are parts of 
that larger whole which is called college life, 
and which defines the whole range of student 
interests and activities : the social intercourse, 
which is generally of a most wholesome and 

242 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

manly kind, the generous opportunity for 
fellowship and friendship, the literary asso- 
ciations, the free discussion of all open ques- 
tions, — and to-day there are no closed ques- 
tions, — the scientific societies which bring 
together small groups of men of kindred 
tastes, the publication of newspapers and 
magazines, and the dramatic organizations; 
these activities supplement and sometimes 
supplant the regular work which the under- 
graduate is supposed to do. The card on the 
wall of a student's room which read "in this 
room study if not allowed to interfere with 
the regular course of college life" was not 
wholly humorous ; for athletic, literary, jour- 
nalistic and social interests are so many that 
the popular student has little time for serious 
study. 

In the older colleges there is a good deal of 
picturesque idleness ; there is very little vice, 
but much wasting of time. A majority of 
students, however, pursue their work with 
fidelity if not with enthusiasm, and get a 
kind of atmospheric education which makes 
them more agreeable companions and more 

243 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

interesting men. For college life is regulated 
by generous ideals of honor, of friendship, 
and of loyalty, which have a more penetrating 
influence than most teachers are able to com- 
mand; and the sentiment which inspires 
college songs, and which stirs the heart of 
the graduate long years afterwards, is an ex- 
pression of the generous idealism which is or 
ought to be the unfailing offering of youth to 
the well-being of the race. 

The American college is a product of 
American conditions and holds a large place 
in the interest and affection of the people. 
It perpetuates the tradition of liberal learn- 
ing which had its modern birth in the Uni- 
versity of Paris in the Middle Ages, which 
has given to Oxford and Cambridge a quality 
that has enriched the literature and the life 
of the English people ; and which, carried 
across the sea, has been shared by a great 
Democracy without loss of its largeness of 
vision and its power of liberating men from 
the narrowness of local interests and pro- 
vincial prejudices. 



244 



IX 

UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

The college in America preceded the uni- 
versity because it was needed earlier in the 
development of the country ; and, with 
loyalty to certain deep-seated traditions which 
came with the colonists, it has adapted itself 
to American conditions. In no other country 
are the higher institutions of learning more 
intimately related to the life of the people. 
This is seen in the large space given to college 
affairs in the daily newspapers, and in the 
position of the heads of colleges and universi- 
ties in public regard. 

The educational leaders are public men as 
truly as the governors of States or the mem- 
bers of the President's Cabinet. They are 
almost invariably represented on all com- 
missions appointed by the government to 
study industrial, social or political conditions ; 
they are called upon to interpret public 
events on notable occasions ; they are often 

245 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

appointed to fill the most distinguished posi- 
tions in the gift of the government. When 
President Lincoln made the address at Gettys- 
burg, which is one of the classics of American 
oratory and the noblest definition of American 
political ideals, the formal oration was de- 
livered by an ex-President of Harvard Uni- 
versity, who had also been American Ambas- 
sador, or Minister, in London ; John Quincy 
Adams, the fifth President of the United 
States, held a professorship in the same in- 
stitution. Lowell, who at a later time taught 
literature in Harvard, was one of the most 
influential diplomatists ever sent by the 
United States to London. The head of the 
University of Michigan represented his coun- 
try at Constantinople during the Spanish- 
American War. The President of Cornell 
University is now American Minister in 
Athens. The retirement of Dr. Eliot from 
the presidency of Harvard was made the sub- 
ject of extended editorial comment by the 
newspapers from Boston to San Francisco; 
and Signor Ferraro, the Italian historian who 
was then in the United States, declared that 

246 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

in no other country would the retirement of 
the head of a university awaken such wide- 
spread public interest. And it is an open 
secret that the position of Ambassador to 
Great Britain was offered to Dr. Eliot and 
declined. 

Although higher education in America is 
not under governmental control, the needs of 
the country have largely determined its scope 
and direction, and the university has been 
as definitely the creation of American con- 
ditions as the college. It was the product of 
a later age. The personality of teachers does 
not count for so much as in the college ; it is 
further removed from the life of the country 
in the sense that the average citizen does not 
feel so much at home with it as with the 
college to which, often with great self-sacrifice, 
he has sent his children. 

In the Central and Far West, however, he 
has had a great deal more to do with the shap- 
ing of the university and the direction of its 
activities than with the making of the college. 
The college was inherited ; it was brought 
over the sea with the religious convictions 

247 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and social habits of his ancestors; the uni- 
versity, as he knows it, was born in his own 
state and has grown up with the society in 
which he lives. 

In many parts of America the granting of 
degrees is within the power of those institu- 
tions only which conform to certain educa- 
tional standards, but in other parts of the 
country the words college and university are 
sometimes assumed by institutions of a high 
school grade. In this field, as in others, the 
foreign observer must know local conditions 
so to speak. An authority on such matters 
has expressed the opinion that of the several 
hundred so-called colleges in the United States 
there are a hundred and twenty -five, perhaps 
one third of the number, which are effective, 
high-class institutions. The other so-called 
colleges often serve a useful purpose. They 
are open doors to a large number of boys and 
girls in remote localities, who would otherwise 
get only a common school education. They 
often grow into colleges; their fault is their 
misleading assumption of a rank to which 
they are not entitled. 

248 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

Of endowed universities there are perhaps 
fifteen or twenty ; and they are all of com- 
paratively recent date. Some of them have 
developed from long-established colleges; 
more have been founded and built up within 
the last four or five decades. One of the most 
influential, the Johns Hopkins, recently cele- 
brated its twenty -fifth anniversary, and the 
University of Chicago, one of the most amply 
equipped and vigorous of these younger in- 
stitutions, has not yet reached its quarter of a 
century. 

Among the first group, Harvard, Yale, 
Columbia, have grown by a normal process 
of evolution out of the old American college. 
They have gradually enlarged the scope of 
studies to meet the needs of a new economic 
age and have changed their organization and 
administration to cope with vastly increased 
numbers of teachers and students, not only 
by widening the field of study but by the 
development of more adequate methods of 
administration. Columbia University, in the 
city of New York, enrolls about six thousand 
students, and has an endowment of about 

249 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

$40,000,000. Thirty years ago it had an 
attendance of three or four hundred. It has 
grown with the country and is in itself a 
history of American educational progress. 
Beginning in the early days of the colonies 
as a high school, it took on later the form 
and functions of a college because colleges 
were demanded by students who wished more 
advanced methods and studies. As the need 
for special training for the professions be- 
came more general, the college gradually 
transformed itself into a university. 

A few of these institutions, like the Johns 
Hopkins University, the University of Chicago 
and the Leland Stanford University in Cali- 
fornia, were established by large endowments 
from private persons. The gifts of the founder 
of the University of Chicago to that institu- 
tion exceed forty millions of dollars. In 
several instances a university has been com- 
pletely organized in advance; a group of 
buildings planned, a large group of teachers 
secured, and libraries and laboratories 
equipped for work. The rapid construction 
of buildings of recent years, in which im- 

250 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

proved machinery and continuous labor se- 
cure speedy results without loss of solidity or 
thoroughness, has been paralleled in the es- 
tablishment of colleges and universities. Such 
institutions lack the traditions and associa- 
tions with eminent persons which give the 
older schools an atmosphere that appeals to 
the imagination and defines the standards of 
achievement; but they often become from 
the start highly effective, not only in impart- 
ing knowledge but in the field of research. 
Within a decade of its foundation the pub- 
lications of the Johns Hopkins University 
found place in the reading rooms of European 
universities and were read by scholars in all 
parts of the world. The first President of 
this university adopted a policy, not always 
pursued in America, of using large means, not 
to erect great buildings but to bring together 
distinguished scholars in the teaching body. 

A third and larger group of universities 
has come into existence to meet the de- 
mand for free education by the States. From 
modest beginnings these institutions have 
grown into thoroughly equipped schools, num- 

251 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

bering their attendance by thousands, and 
commanding great incomes yielded by a small 
percentage of the total tax laid by the State 
upon its citizens. The practical use of these 
institutions in the development of the agri- 
cultural, mining and manufacturing interests 
of the State have been so obvious that the 
taxpayers not only support but enforce a 
policy of generous appropriations for their 
support in the legislatures; and the remote 
small farmer feels that the university stands 
ready, not only to educate his children but to 
help him develop his farm. The head of one 
of these institutions said not long ago that his 
difficulty lay not in getting money but in 
wisely expending it. In the previous years 
his university has received from the State a 
sum of money equivalent to the income of an 
endowment of forty million dollars. From 
feeble beginnings in Georgia, Tennessee and 
North Carolina at the end of the eighteenth 
century State institutions doing thorough 
work are to be found ; while in all the Western 
and in many other Southern States the state 
universities are housed in buildings of great 

252 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

size, though not always of impressive archi- 
tecture, and probably include in their mem- 
bership three fourths of the three hundred 
and fifty thousand students in the American 
colleges and universities. 

In the majority of these state institutions 
the courses of study are practical and voca- 
tional, though other studies are pursued ; 
and the alertness and intellectual activity of 
the typical western college student keep him 
in touch with all the interests of the day. 
In the West all these institutions are largely 
attended by women. 

The word university is applied in America 
to institutions of widely different types and 
standards. It may mean a State university 
which offers a great variety of practical studies 
and directs its research work chiefly if not 
wholly to applied science, in its relations to 
agriculture and industry. It may mean, and 
for many years it did mean, a college which 
has affiliated with itself schools of medicine, 
law and theology. Yale represents this type. 
It may mean an institution in which oppor- 
tunities for advanced work are afforded, as 

253 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

in Harvard and the Johns Hopkins. It 
may mean an institution which provides 
courses of study in all departments of applied 
science. Lehigh is a typical institution of 
this kind. Or it may mean an institution 
devoted exclusively to laboratory methods 
and research work, for graduate students. 
Clark University is a leader in this field. 

Of universities in the European sense there 
are perhaps fifteen or twenty in the United 
States, and these are organized largely on the 
lines of the German Universities. The first 
direct educational influence from Europe 
which made itself felt in America was English. 
Eighty-five years ago the first group of 
American students went to the German Uni- 
versities after completing the college course at 
home. Their number gradually increased, 
for American youth were eager to carry their 
studies further than the American colleges 
made possible. By the middle of the last 
century men trained under German methods 
were represented on the faculties of the most 
progressive colleges, and under German in- 
fluence these institutions were gradually modi- 

254 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

fied to conform more closely to the German 
model. The English type gave place in con- 
siderable measure to the German type; and, 
while the English Grammar School stood as a 
model for the early classical school in the 
colonies, and Oxford and Cambridge fur- 
nished the ideals of the American college, the 
German Universities have greatly influenced 
the organization, methods and aims of Ameri- 
can universities. For many years there was 
an increasing attendance of Americans in 
Berlin, Heidelberg and other German institu- 
tions, and the opportunities for advanced 
work at home were so limited that the student 
who looked forward to an academic career was 
practically compelled to supplement his study 
at home by study in some foreign university ; 
to have studied abroad was not formally re- 
quired of the men who sought places as 
teachers in the American colleges ; but it 
was so generally expected that the man who 
lacked it was seriously handicapped. 

This German influence, largely scientific in 
its direction, was reenforced by the increasing 
demand for men of scientific training in many 

%55 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

important industries. It led to the introduc- 
tion of the elective system, to the breaking 
up of the classes into divisions, to the widen- 
ing of the field of study; and to a readjust- 
ment of educational values. It shifted the 
emphasis from the Humanities to the sciences, 
and put discipline and training on a level with 
culture as the chief ends of education. 

German methods have not been slavishly 
followed, however, and the German influence 
is neither so direct nor so obvious as it was 
twenty years ago. Americans have adopted 
what was valuable for American uses in 
German methods as they had earlier adopted 
what was valuable in English methods, and 
have worked out their own educational scheme. 
To the English universities that scheme is 
greatly indebted for the classical tradition 
with its emphasis on quality and richness of 
the intellectual life, and to the German uni- 
versities for a greatly enlarged range of study, 
for more thorough and scientific methods of 
work, for a strong impetus toward original 
investigation, and for high standards of tech- 
nical training. The German influence has 

256 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

involved some loss of interest in classical and 
literary studies and has blunted somewhat 
the sense of form and the feeling for the finer 
qualities of literary expression ; it substi- 
tuted literary scholarship for love of liter- 
ature and for a time made the study of Eng- 
lish largely a matter of philology. But the 
pendulum is swinging back, and in the teach- 
ing of English the literary spirit is making 
itself felt with an increasing effectiveness. 
In this field the French influence has come to 
the aid of the earlier ideals of literary study. 

Opportunities for advanced work in the 
American Universities are now so ample that 
study in foreign universities, while not with- 
out its advantages, is no longer. a necessity, 
and the number of Americans in German uni- 
versities has greatly fallen off. 

The need of highly trained men in many 
kinds of business, in enterprises requiring 
engineering skill of a high order, in mining, 
agriculture and the construction and manage- 
ment of railroads, has called into existence a 
large number of high-grade institutions of a 
scientific character, among the most promi- 

257 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

nent of which are the Boston Institute of 
Technology, the Stevens Institute, the Troy 
Polytechnic, the Columbia School of Mines, 
and Lehigh University. These and other 
kindred institutions are scientific universities. 
In no department have the standards of 
preparation been more rapidly advanced than 
in teaching. Pedagogy is comparatively a 
new science in America, but it has taken a 
place of the first importance in public regard. 
In the higher grades of school work, college 
and normal school degrees or certificates are 
now required. The State universities have 
made ample provision for pedagogic training, 
normal schools are part of the public school 
system in every state; and in the Teachers 
College, affiliated with Columbia University 
in New York, advanced courses in educational 
work are provided and are attended by large 
numbers of students whose enthusiasm is the 
best evidence of the vitality of its methods. 
In Clark University, an institution for re- 
search which is doing a notable work in train- 
ing teachers for colleges and universities, this 
department is specially well equipped, and its 

258 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

President, Dr. G. Stanley Hall, has been one of 
the prophets of pedagogy in America. 

There is a marked tendency to bring tech- 
nical training of all kinds into close relation 
with the universities. Many medical, law 
and theological schools, and schools of ap- 
plied science, were originally established on an 
independent basis and the entrance require- 
ments made it possible for men to specialize 
on a very inadequate foundation of general 
knowledge. The medical student came to 
his professional studies without even a high 
school diploma; he often went straight from 
the farm to the lecture room and the clinic; 
and this was also true in a measure of the 
theological and law student. This lack of co- 
ordination no longer exists ; many professional 
schools are open only to students who have 
completed a college course or its equivalent ; 
and those schools which have grown up as inde- 
pendent institutions have affiliated themselves 
with universities and, without losing their in- 
dividuality, have come into relations with other 
departments of knowledge and have con- 
formed to more scientific methods of teaching. 

259 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

Meantime, as has been said, the colleges 
have modified their courses so as to offer the 
student opportunities of taking some of his 
professional work as part of his college work 
and in this way shortening the time to his 
ultimate graduation. This tendency will un- 
doubtedly lead in the end to the complete 
cooperation of the professional school and the 
university and to the taking over by the uni- 
versity of all forms of advanced training. 
This will mean not only greater economy and 
efficiency of management, but broader oppor- 
tunities for the professional student, the freer 
atmosphere of university life and a better 
perspective of life in general. 

The universities fill a great place in America 
and are steadily increasing their influence. 
They guard the gates of the professions and 
challenge the applicant for admission to prove 
his fitness to discharge the duties that 
fall to him. They have largely created the 
demand for thorough preparation for the 
pursuit of callings, which, like the practice of 
law and of medicine, are essentially public 
functions and require public regulation. 

260 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

They teach the army of teachers whose func- 
tion is also a public function. They train 
the chemists, engineers and men of affairs 
upon whose integrity and skill the nation de- 
pends for safety and prosperity. Their in- 
fluence has contributed to the movement 
which is taking the administrative side of the 
government out of politics and placing it on 
a basis of merit and permanency of tenure. 
To them is committed the work of advancing 
knowledge by investigation and research; 
not only by "seeking knowledge wherever it 
may be found," to recall a noble phrase of the 
late Emperor of Japan, but to add to that 
capital of knowledge which is the common 
possession of all nations. They have already 
removed the reproach that American scholar- 
ship, while highly effective in transmitting 
knowledge, has made no notable contribu- 
tions to its sum total. The work of educa- 
tion in a new country was immediate and en- 
grossing, but the time has now come when 
the universities are able to take their place 
with institutions in the Old World in advanc- 
ing the skirmish line of knowledge. 

261 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

A group of great foundations have been 
created during the past few years, which aim 
not only to provide for and promote research, 
but to reenforce the specific endowments for 
higher education. The Carnegie Institution 
of Washington administers a fund of about 
$42,000,000, which may be regarded as the 
capitalization of research. The directors of 
this fund are given large discretion in the 
selection of objects, persons or enterprises to 
be aided; the general purpose being to give 
support to forms of research which require 
prolonged effort, to provide opportunities 
for original work by men of notable ability 
and efficiency, and to make possible the pub- 
lication of the results of these ventures in the 
field of knowledge. The income of this fund 
may be devoted to scientific, geographical, or 
purely scholarly investigation, and may be 
expended in a variety of enterprises or con- 
centrated in some field in which the need or 
the immediate promise of greater knowledge 
is pressing. 

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Re- 
search in the city of New York is an experi- 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

ment station for the investigation of diseases 
and of possible prevention and remedies. 
It has already rendered signal service to the 
country by putting expert service in coopera- 
tion with the medical profession, by stimulat- 
ing the scientific spirit in that profession, and 
by concentrating investigation on pressing 
medical problems. 

The widest field of work is that occupied 
by the General Education Board, which ad- 
ministers various large funds. The activities 
of this board are directed to three main pur- 
poses : the improvement of agriculture in the 
Southern States, the development of high 
schools in that section, and the promotion of 
higher education in all parts of the country. 
This fund amounts to nearly $33,000,000, and 
the net income is about $1,700,000. Last 
year forty-two colleges were aided by gifts 
amounting to $1,300,000. Large sums were 
devoted to demonstration work for farmers 
and for the reenforcement of schools in the 
south. 

A fund which constitutes a great endow- 
ment for the colleges and universities in the 

263 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

country which meet certain tests of educa- 
tional efficiency is administered by the Car- 
negie Foundation for the Advancement of 
Teaching, which distributes annually the in- 
come of $15,000,000 in retiring allowances 
for college and university teachers who have 
reached the age of sixty -five years and have 
been in service for twenty -five years. In 
1910 the number of beneficiaries of this fund 
was 364, and the average allowance paid was 
nearly $1,900,000. This provision for the old 
age of teachers has contributed greatly to the 
stability and attractiveness of academic teach- 
ing ; and, reenforced by the pension systems 
of individual colleges, has relieved a host of 
able and devoted men rendering the highest 
service to the nation on salaries too small to 
make provision for old age possible, of the 
pressure of anxiety for the future support of 
their families. In many colleges provision is 
made for a year's leave of absence on half- 
salary every seven years. 

Large funds are also expended by the 
Southern Education Board, which has greatly 
stimulated educational progress in the South- 

264 



UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH WORK 

era States, and deals with educational con- 
ditions in that part of the country from a 
strategic point of view; concentrating its 
help at points where the need of immediate 
assistance is most pressing. 

The Russell Sage Foundation, organized 
five years ago with an endowment of 
$10,000,000, has for its object the investiga- 
tion and eradication, so far as is possible, of 
"The Causes of Poverty and Ignorance," 
and its work is already beginning to show 
fruit. It serves among other purposes as a 
center of information concerning the work of 
hundreds of social settlements, improvement 
clubs and organizations for social betterment 
maintained by women's clubs, college societies 
and private organizations in cities in all parts 
of the country. This fund not only conducts 
investigations but affords practical relief. 

In a broader field a work of high educational 
importance is conducted by the Carnegie 
Endowment for International Peace, which 
expends yearly the income of a fund of 
$10,000,000, in the maintenance of a division 
of international law which is collecting all 
• ~265 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the data bearing on international arbitration ; 
a Division of Economies and History, which is 
making a scientific study of the historical and 
economic causes of war; and a Division of 
Intercourse and Education. 

These funds constitute a great endowment 
for advanced and aggressive educational work 
in the United States, and show the widespread 
interest in education among Americans, and 
their faith in its efficiency in the development 
of the national resources and life. During 
the last decade the gifts from private donors 
for education have aggregated at least 
$100,000,000. 



266 



THE AMERICAN AND HIS 
GOVERNMENT 

The stages of growth through which Japan, 
India, China, England and the nations of 
Europe passed in the legendary age the United 
States passed through under the eyes, so to 
speak, of the scientific historian. Mystery 
envelops the origins of other great peoples, 
and when they emerge into clear light they 
are racially unified and think, feel and act as 
nations. They are jealous of foreign in- 
fluence; they regard the stranger with sus- 
picion and treat him with disfavor. This is 
the early history of every people, Asiatic or 
European. The line of race descent is guarded 
with the utmost care and its purity becomes 
a matter of national concern. As a matter of 
fact, however, there is no absolute purity of 
race; and there ought to be none if variety 
and richness of temperament, intellectual 

267 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and moral trait, capacity for creative and 
practical activity, are essential to the com- 
plete expression of the human spirit. It is 
as easy to trace the Danish, Saxon and Nor- 
man strains in English art and history as to 
trace the hand of these vanished races in wall 
and road, in castle and church ; and English 
life and character have been immensely ener- 
gized and enriched by this commingling of 
races. To-day, however, we do not remember 
the Dane, the Saxon, the Norman when we 
speak of England ; we think of a people who 
stand out distinctly from the peoples which 
surround them. In England, as in Japan, 
the fusion was accomplished so long ago that 
its stages have passed out of sight and the 
world sees only a completely developed nation. 
In the United States this process of growth 
has taken place not behind closed doors as is 
the case of other nations, but in full view of 
the world ; and the idea held by some writers 
that the Americans are a conglomeration of 
races without unity of ideal, national feeling 
or tradition, is as misleading as the idea that 
England is a mere aggregation of peoples of 

268 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

different blood. All nations are composite. 
The intermingling of races in America is only 
later in point of time; and, as a result of the 
American system, the assimilation of the 
national spirit is extraordinarily rapid. The 
atmosphere has a transforming quality. 
There is nothing more moving in the United 
States than the spectacle of two thousand 
Jewish children, whose parents have not yet 
learned to speak the English language, rising 
in their places in the assembly rooms of one 
of the city schools to salute the flag, or the 
ardor with which a group of recently arrived 
Italian immigrants will sing the national 
anthem. 

It must not be forgotten that the earlier 
settlers in the New World, though of differ- 
ent races, w T ere of a kindred spirit. The 
families from which they came were not far 
apart in point of development; they were of 
kindred rather than alien races; above all, 
they were moved by a few powerful motives 
which sent them on a common adventure, 
and developed in them qualities which pre- 
pared them for united action. They differed 

269 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

widely in religious convictions, in political 
ideals and in social habits ; but they were all 
seekers after a larger freedom of action, more 
ample opportunities of personal and family 
life. To secure these things they braved great 
dangers and endured great hardships; for the 
most part they were adventurers of the nobler 
sort; seekers after the better fortunes of the 
race: freedom to think their own thoughts 
and live their own lives, better conditions 
for their children, more room for activity. 
Shut off from Europe by the peril and 
length of the voyage across the ocean; en- 
circled by vigilant foes ; sharing the fortunes 
of pioneers on a remote frontier, the colonists 
were driven together by the conditions in 
which they lived and by a colonial policy which 
bore heavily upon them all and bred a grow- 
ing discontent in every colony. The English, 
the Scotch, the Dutch brought with them well- 
defined ideas of political liberty; while the 
French, driven from their old homes by the 
tyranny of an arbitrary personal government, 
found the air of the New World stimulating to 
the impulse toward freedom. 

270 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

When the long-smoldering antagonism 
against Great Britain became actual rebellion, 
the colonies stood together in a common cause. 
Their unity was marred by petty social jeal- 
ousies, but they rapidly learned cooperation, 
and when the hour for the adoption of the 
Constitution arrived there was an American 
people to accept it as the formal organization 
of a nation. Magna Charta, the Bill of 
Rights, the Act of Settlement, registered the 
will of the English people; the Constitution 
proclaimed in Japan in 1893 is an impressive 
revelation of the hidden forces, the secret 
sources of strength in the Japanese character ; 
but neither the English nor the Japanese 
nation was created by these memorable docu- 
ments. The fourth day of July, on which 
the Declaration of Independence was signed 
in 1776, is celebrated as the birthday of the 
United States, but on that day the Americans 
were already a people in the same sense in 
which the English and Japanese are peoples. 
They were not made a nation by written docu- 
ments ; they dictated the documents. The 
language of the Declaration of Independence 

271 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

is significant ; it is not a definition of the pur- 
pose of the colonists to become independent; 
it begins with the statement "That these 
United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, 
free and independent states." In other words 
there was already in 1776 an American people, 
who held a common view of their status and 
rights and were ready to act together to main- 
tain them. The different races were already, 
a century and a quarter after the first feeble 
attempt to build a home on the edge of the 
continent, welded together by common ideals 
of political order and fused into one people 
by their experiences in the New World. 

They were the children of a century in 
which the human spirit had a new birth in 
energy of imagination, in faith in its power to 
dare greatly and achieve greatly. Shake- 
speare in the world of creative art; Drake 
and Frobisher in the world of adventure and 
action ; Milton the singer, and Cromwell the 
soldier, half a century later, were the leaders 
of a movement of expansion which not only 
created a greater England over seas, but gave 
the English spirit the freedom of a greater 

272 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

world. The Puritan in New England ; the 
exiled cavalier in Virginia ; the persecuted 
Friends in Pennsylvania; the Huguenots in 
New York and South Carolina, to whom their 
convictions were dearer than the fair fields of 
France ; the hardy Scotch-Irish ; had all felt 
the powerful influence which had turned the 
eyes of adventurous men in many countries 
to the New World, and daring spirits every- 
where had responded to the cry heard on the 
Thames in Shakespeare's time: "Westward 
Ho !" There were among the colonists men 
who hated the rigid formalities of life in the 
Old World ; men for whom the free life of the 
frontier had an irresistible attraction; and 
there were also a small group who found in 
the wilderness a refuge from courts and jails. 
To these builders of communities along the 
Atlantic coast the spirit of the eighteenth 
century, the age both of reason and of senti- 
ment, of Hume and Locke, of Voltaire and 
Rousseau, of the daring speculators who made 
ready for the Revolution in France, gave not 
only a fresh impulse toward freedom of 
thought, but a philosophical basis for the 
T 273 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

democratic order. In 1776 the colonists were 
still a feeble folk, but they had gained self- 
confidence; they had been alienated from 
Europe by a policy which was as stupid as it 
was arbitrary ; and they were becoming con- 
scious of the possession of a vast estate. A 
few among their leaders already had visions 
of the nation that was to be long after the in- 
dependence had been achieved. These and 
other influences had combined to make an 
American people and to make an American 
spirit. It is easier to describe a spirit than 
to define it; and a description is mainly an 
enumeration of qualities. In such an analysis 
skill lies as much in what is omitted as in 
what is included; for, while many qualities 
give the spirit of a people shading and pro- 
portion, a few qualities give it the distinction 
of aim and emotional content which make it 
possible to differentiate the Japanese, the 
French, the English and the American spirit. 
The most obvious expression of the Ameri- 
can spirit is the political organization of the 
nation. Local governments manage local 
affairs, build and maintain schools, make 

274 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

roads, enforce sanitary conditions, impose and 
collect taxes ; county governments regulate 
the affairs of larger units of political organiza- 
tions ; State governments direct the affairs of 
the forty -eight States into which the country 
is divided, as Japan is divided into provinces ; 
and a National government, composed of the 
President, the executive head of the govern- 
ment; the Congress, consisting of a House of 
Representatives elected directly by the people; 
and a smaller body, the Senate, elected by the 
legislatures of the States, manage the affairs 
of the nations. The Supreme Court, a group 
\ of nine judges appointed by the President 
for life unless removed by the very rare pro- 
cess of impeachment, has power to declare 
acts of Congress unconstitutional, and as the 
official interpreter of the Constitution, so to 
speak, has had a great part in shaping the 
political development of the country. 

The Constitution not only created the form 
of government under which the American 
people have lived since 1789 and defined its 
functions, but definitely limited the authority 
of that government and guaranteed the rights 

275 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

of the individual citizen, not only as against 
the invasion of other citizens but against their 
invasion by the government or itself. The 
American Bill of Rights is incorporated in 
the Constitution. Foreign students of the 
American system have found it difficult to 
understand because, as a distinguished Eng- 
lish publicist has said, they have been unable 
to discover where the supreme power, the 
sovereignty, is placed. That sovereignty can- 
not be found in the government; it does not 
inhere in the President, in the Supreme Court 
or in Congress ; nor does it lodge in the forty- 
eight States which now compose the United 
States. The sovereignty is neither in the 
Constitution nor in the government organized 
under it; it is in the people of the United 
States, who made the Constitution and re- 
served to themselves the sole right to change 
it by addition or amendment; a right which 
they have already exercised sixteen times. 
It follows almost as a matter of course that 
the Constitution is a definition of principles, 
not a code of laws or a body of regulations. 
Under this flexible system American life 
276 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

has developed with such freedom that the hand 
of the Federal government has hardly been 
felt by the private citizen. The system of 
indirect taxation has left his pocket untouched, 
and the government at Washington has been 
something about which he has talked much, 
but for which, except in great crises, he has 
done little ; not through lack of patriotism 
but because its demands upon him have been 
so few. This freedom from burdens has made 
possible some of the problems with which 
Americans are dealing to-day ; entire absence of 
oversight and control of great business enter- 
prises has made room for serious abuses of 
privilege, for the creation of private monop- 
olies, for oppressive discrimination against 
individuals and communities, for indiffer- 
ence to the interests both of the public and of 
investors. An unexampled prosperity has so 
completely absorbed the activities of the 
country that the inadequacy of law to meet 
the new conditions was not recognized until 
gross abuses began to stir public indignation 
and call for governmental action. 

The War between the States compelled 
277 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the Federal government, as a matter of self- 
preservation, to assume powers not before 
exercised, and new conditions have compelled 
it to assume closer relations with the life of 
the people ; but it has never been the supreme 
expression of that life. The sovereign might 
have said at any moment "Vetat, c'esi moi" 
for the sovereign is the people. The Amer- 
ican has conceived of his government as exist- 
ing to keep the house in order while the 
family lived its life freely, every individual 
following the bent of his own genius within 
well-defined limits of social law. Political 
and public life have never been synonymous. 
There has been no lack of able men in the 
service of the government, but the government 
has been one of a number of channels through 
which the life of the nation has flowed. That 
life has been of far greater volume than the 
political history of the nation accounts for. 
Into the field of individual action the 
American government does not enter; in 
that field, in which lie religion, the family 
education, science, professional activity, fi- 
nance, commerce, business, journalism, there 

278 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

has been entire freedom for individual energy 
and ability. Public opinion controls the gov- 
ernment, and the leaders of this opinion have 
been as often at the bar, in the universities, 
in the pulpit, in the editor's chair, as in the 
White House or in Congress. 

The National government found itself the 
owner of immense tracts of unoccupied land, 
and for many years this land was practically 
given away to all who were willing to develop 
it ; and there are now three thousand miles of 
farms from the Atlantic to the Pacific, extend- 
ing over an area between Canada and Mexico 
a thousand miles wide. There are, therefore, 
an unprecedented number of private owners 
of property in the country ; of men who have 
an interest in social and political stability 
and who will act as a conservative force in 
any economic or social crisis through which 
the nation may pass. The national territory 
has been so vast that until within the last two 
decades there has always been a frontier. 

It has taken the Americans nearly three 
centuries to get their estate under cultivation, 
and during the whole period of their existence 

279 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

as a people, they have exhibited contempora- 
neously all stages of social development, from 
the most stable and conservative to the most 
changeable and radical; from cities which 
mark the location of the earliest colonies, 
Boston and New York, Washington and 
Charleston, to the mining camp and the 
cattle range. This is one of the facts about 
America which foreigners find it difficult to 
understand, and when they read of the robbery 
of a stagecoach in a lonely defile of the Sierra 
Nevadas, they forget that they are reading of 
a section still in the frontier stage of develop- 
ment and not far removed from the time when 
isolated communities were compelled to make 
and execute their own laws. The new com- 
munities formed by the continuous stream of 
settlers who have moved westward have 
passed through all the stages of political organ- 
ization which have been characteristic of the 
American system. In the earliest and rudest 
conditions they have governed themselves; 
the instinct for order in the American, devel- 
oped by many centuries of steadily widening 
self-government, is so much a part of him that 

280 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

in the most remote mining camp, among men 
of the roughest habits, some kind of local 
order is established. As the communities 
have grown, they have been organized into 
territories, which is the final stage before 
statehood ; and as soon as the population has 
met the requirements, the territory has been 
admitted as a state. 

The whole process, however, has been car- 
ried on by individual initiative; and not 
until a sufficient number of individuals have 
united have the privileges of State or National 
government been accorded to them. 

Under a political system so flexible and free, 
on a territory of vast extent awaiting settle- 
ment, a people with the political antecedents 
and the disciplinary experience of the Amer- 
icans have exhibited certain traits which may 
be regarded as national characteristics, creat- 
ing what may be called the American spirit. 

The American has learned to take care of 
himself ; he does not expect the government to 
take care of him. Many of the services which 
are rendered to the individual in other coun- 
tries he performs for himself. He has so 

281 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

long taken the possession of individual free- 
dom for granted, that he expects the govern- 
ment to do as little as possible for him or 
with him. He asks for a free field and a 
fair chance ; the rest he expects to do for him- 
self. He chooses his own form of religion, his 
school, his college, his profession, his wife, his 
place of residence, his manner of life, his 
recreations. He objects to any supervision 
of these personal affairs, and he is accepting 
government regulation of certain forms of 
business, not because he likes it, but because 
he sees that it is necessary. When he travels 
abroad he recognizes and enjoys the help which 
governments more paternal in character render 
to their citizens; but long habit has accus- 
tomed him to rely on himself at home. 

He is jealous of his personal independence 
and he is self-reliant. These qualities brought 
his ancestors to the New World, created the 
political conditions under which he lives, and 
have developed the country. He expects to 
support his church, to contribute to the char- 
ities of his neighborhood or town, to help 
endow schools, colleges and hospitals. If he 

282 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

pays taxes to support a State University he 
expects that university to work with and for 
the state. He gives more and more generously 
to build and endow art museums and hos- 
pitals, to create parks, to secure from business 
uses national scenery. The largeness of mod- 
ern undertakings and their interstate rela- 
tions are accustoming him to the appearance 
of the government in new fields and exercising 
larger powers; but if a monument is to be 
built, a college endowed in some neglected 
section, a reform movement set on foot, his 
first thought is to call together a few influen- 
tial men and give individual initiative the 
force and influence of public not governmen- 
tal organization. The first impulse comes 
from the individual, and individual initiative 
has been perhaps the prime element in the 
development of the country. Such educa- 
tional institutions as Hampton Institute, 
Tuskegee, and Berea College, doing work of 
the highest importance, were created by in- 
dividuals. 

To the general statement of the reliance of 
the individual on his own exertions without 

283 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

aid from the government there has been one 
notable and profoundly influential exception. 
The policy of protection has hastened and 
developed American industries and has added 
immensely to the wealth of the country. 
But, aside from its commercial value, it has 
had one very disastrous effect : it has accus- 
tomed a very large class of business interests 
to look to the government for aid in the build- 
ing up of private enterprises. The govern- 
ment has become, in effect, the silent partner 
in many manufacturing industries, and great 
business interests have become so involved 
with political action that a system of trading 
grew up between a certain class of politicians 
and certain protected industries, which has 
been the source of widespread political cor- 
ruption. This state of things has set in 
motion a determined and successful effort to 
make an end of an unnatural alliance. The 
tariff of the future will be out of politics. Even 
when they have sought the aid of the govern- 
ment, some Americans have regarded the 
national authority as their servant and have 
used it to advance their private fortunes. 

284 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

Emerson, who is the prophet as well as the 
poet of the American political and social order, 
defined America in one significant word : 
opportunity. It has not only held its entrance 
doors open to all comers, but it has kept the 
inner doors open, so that a man might pass 
from room to room as fast and as long as he 
had the strength to open the doors. Educa- 
tion, fortune and station have been and are 
open to all ; the penniless boy has become the 
head of a leading university, the governor 
of his state or its senator ; the frontier young 
man, without opportunity of formal education 
but with the passion for knowledge and im- 
pelled by a noble ambition, has become 
President. In America the goals are many 
and the race is open to all; success is largely 
a question of ability and endurance. 

There are no fixed and permanent social 
and economic classes in the country and there 
is a settled determination that there never 
shall be ; that the field shall be kept open and 
that all shall strive under impartial conditions, 
with special privileges to none. The doctrine 
of political equality does not mean social, 

285 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

intellectual or economic equality : it means 
equality of opportunity to all men to put 
forth their energy and to win and keep the 
rewards of their ability, character and in- 
dustry. 

The American boy grows up in a stimulat- 
ing atmosphere. He is familiar from his 
earliest youth with the romances of heroic 
endeavor. The story of honorable success is 
told in a thousand forms, but its elements are 
few and obvious; character, self-reliance, cour- 
age, industry. During the last thirty years 
the opportunities of fortune making have been 
unprecedented and have presented unprece- 
dented temptations to unfair and tyrannical 
dealing, and many men have fallen victims to 
the desire to make great fortunes over night, 
so to speak ; but many instances of prosperous 
dishonor — if dishonor can ever be prosper- 
ous — have not blurred the essential soundness 
and integrity of American success. 

The New World was settled by men who 
expected to better their conditions and that 
expectation has been and is a constant force 
in American life. The boy expects to be a 

286 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

man of influence and fortune ; the local banker 
expects to become a financier ; the small trader 
expects to become a great merchant ; the 
obscure young scholar dreams of the oppor- 
tunities of a chair in the university ; the 
rising lawyer, with an instinct for public 
affairs, anticipates the honor of political sta- 
tion and leadership. Every man in America 
is looking forward ; the country is always plan- 
ning for the future. That future is not, how T - 
ever, a vague hope, a mere expectation ; it is an 
enormous national asset because it stands for 
a volume of undeveloped resources which are 
tangible and, in large measure, calculable; 
the development of which is a matter of time 
and capital. This sense of futurity is in- 
evitable in a country which is still largely 
undeveloped. There has been a little intox- 
ication in the air and it has sometimes found 
its way into the popular speech. But the 
"tall talk" which Dickens found both offen- 
sive and amusing is heard to-day only in hotly 
contested elections or in the mouths of the 
representatives of remote rural constituencies. 
The average American is amused or bored by it. 

287 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

An Englishman of distinction has said that 
two qualities pervade American society to a 
degree of which Americans themselves are 
unaware — helpfulness and hope. These are 
frontier qualities. Settlers in a new country 
form the habit of standing together, and they 
always look forward to safety, comfort and 
prosperity. And in a country in which the 
frontier has only recently disappeared and in 
large sections of which the earliest generation 
of settlers is still represented, the habit of 
helpfulness and the spirit of hope are in the 
air. 

Along the Atlantic seaboard the oldest com- 
munities have their social traditions, their 
well-defined social standards; but in these 
communities new groups of people are contin- 
ually coming to the front, bringing with them 
a careless indifference to the imaginary social 
lines drawn by the descendants of the older 
families ; the Central West, into whose hands 
the political control of the country has passed, 
and the Far West, steadily gaining weight in 
the direction of national affairs, are radically 
democratic. This does not mean that they 

288 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

refuse to recognize superiority of character or 
training, or that they are envious of the 
wealth of others ; it means that they are bent 
on the preservation of a social order in which 
men shall be respected, not for what they 
inherit but for what they achieve; and that 
the paths to success shall be kept open. 
This determination to keep the doors open to 
industry and ability is one of the prime factors 
in the struggle now going on in America to 
make an end of special privileges and to keep 
a free field for individual effort. The fight 
is not against wealth, but against giving 
opportunities for acquiring wealth to a few 
instead of offering, as near as possible, the 
same opportunities to all. 

"The treasury of America," President Wil- 
son has recently said, "lies in those ambitions, 
those energies, that cannot be restricted to a 
special favored class. It depends upon the 
inventions of unknown men, upon the origina- 
tions of unknown men, upon the ambitions of 
unknown men. Every country is renewed 
out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of 
the ranks of those already famous and power- 
u 289 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

ful and in control." To keep the door of 
opportunity so easily moved that a touch of 
strength, of energy, of ability will set it wide 
is the settled determination of the Americans 
of to-day. 

The average American resents the exploita- 
tion of wealth and the endeavor to create a 
social order on a property basis. He respects 
an aristocracy based on blood, though he 
refuses to regard it as constituting a basis 
for political privilege; but he resents the 
effort to establish a plutocracy. In a western 
community, where the democratic spirit is 
most pronounced, the man who has made a 
fortune fairly avoids vulgar display and is 
generous in his support of community inter- 
ests, — is held in high respect as a citizen 
who is also a good neighbor. For neighborli- 
ness, which is helpfulness become habitual and 
practical, is almost a fetish in America. It 
has come down from the days when the little 
group of families on the frontier made a kind 
of common capital of their resources ; fought 
together for the safety of their homes ; worked 
together when their crops were threatened by 

290 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

sudden dangers; and in sickness or sorrow 
became one family. The average American 
is proud of the success of his neighbor ; it 
reflects a certain credit on himself and on the 
community ; but when the successful man 
remains in the neighborhood but ceases to 
be a neighbor, he becomes not envious of his 
wealth but offended by his selfish use of it. 
Mr. Kipling has said that the French talk 
a great deal about liberty, equality and frater- 
nity, but care only for equality; that the 
English hate equality and fraternity, but 
care greatly for liberty; that Americans are 
indifferent to liberty and equality, but insist 
on fraternity. And it is true that good-fel- 
lowship counts immensely in public regard in 
America. To be a "good-fellow," to have 
cordial manners, to keep a pleasant word 
ready, to be easy of access and always at hand 
with a cheerful temper and a willingness to 
help, is to have a wide latitude in the matter 
of personal conduct. The political "boss" 
understands this weakness in his countrymen 
and has organized "good-fellowship" into a 
system which the reformers find it hard to 

291 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

overturn. He is so ready to serve his con- 
stituents that he seems to them an efficient 
servant of the community ; when, as a matter 
of fact, his cordiality and helpfulness are 
simply political assets. He finds work for the 
unemployed, makes generous gifts of coal 
and flour when work and wages fail, supplies 
doctors and medicines in sickness, arranges 
excursions and dances for his supporters 
among the working classes, and stands before 
them as a friend in need on a great scale. 

Many a corruptionist in American politics 
has held his place because he was known to be 
a devoted husband and father, a generous 
giver to churches and charities, and a man with 
a cordial grasp of the hand and a pleasant 
smile for all comers. 

But this regard for the man of genial man- 
ners and readiness to help is the excess of one 
of the finest American qualities, neighborliness. 
In this respect America is a great village from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific, and what happens 
in Portland, Maine, greatly interests the 
people of Portland, Oregon. If there is an 
outbreak of yellow fever in some section of the 

292 



AMERICAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT 

South, doctors and nurses are rushed to the 
point, by special train if necessary; if great 
floods bring widespread suffering in the Mis- 
sissippi Valley, the whole nation opens its 
pocketbook; if Charleston is damaged by an 
earthquake, subscriptions for the benefit of 
the suffering are instantly forwarded; if a 
great fire sweeps a city, other cities stand ready 
to help it rebuild ; when San Francisco was 
overtaken by a great calamity a few years 
ago, the nation rose as one man to help it. 
Cities, villages, boards of trade, churches, 
opened subscription lists, and $9,500,000 was 
sent at once, and more would have gone if the 
local committee of relief had not announced 
that no more money could be used to advan- 
tage. The nation thought of little else for 
weeks, and every kind of aid, public and pri- 
vate, was at the service of the stricken city. 
The whole country was neighbor to it. 

The instinct that makes Americans jealous 
of any loss of this spirit of neighborliness is 
sound; for it is not only a deep spring of 
democratic feeling but a moderating and 
regulating influence in a country in which 

293 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

individual initiative plays so great a part. 
It does not check individual energy but sub- 
dues it to common uses ; redeems it from hard 
selfishness ; and sweetens success by insisting 
that it shall be shared with the community. 

There are men of immense wealth in 
America whose names have become symbols 
of business oppression, of unfair methods 
in crushing competitors, of lessening oppor- 
tunities for young men with no other capital 
than character, energy and ability. They are 
disliked not because they are rich men — that 
is, in itself, a matter of indifference — but 
because they have not been good neighbors. 
To keep this spirit of generous sharing of 
opportunity, of mutual helpfulness, Ameri- 
cans are just now revising their laws, extending 
the authority of the National government and 
pledging themselves anew, in many practical 
ways, that the government of the people, by 
the people, for the people shall not perish 
from the face of the earth. 



294 



XI 

COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

Much confusion of thought has been caused 
by the habit of speaking of peoples as if 
they were all cast in the same mold. We 
are so accustomed to the use of the phrase 
"the Japanese," "the English," "the Ameri- 
cans" that we have come to think of these 
words as definite and exact characterizations. 
Nothing could be more misleading; these 
peoples have certain physical characteristics 
which are the results of race and climate ; they 
have certain racial forms of thought and 
speech ; but they present differences of 
character and culture as marked as those which 
exist between alien races. It has taken Europe 
a long time to learn that there are Americans 
and Americans ; and that the London cockney 
is not further removed in intelligence from 
the Englishman of university training than is 
the ignorant American from the man who, 

295 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

like Lowell, has the knowledge of the Old and 
the wit of the New World. In France the 
men of Normandy and of Brittany are French- 
men, but in temperament and habit of thought 
they are farther apart than some Frenchmen 
and Italians. 

America, like Japan, has several climates. 
In the Far North deep snow lies on the ground 
almost half the year ; in the woods of Maine 
and Michigan the winter has an arctic severity. 
In the Far South the roses bloom in every 
month, and sea bathing is a recreation in 
January. On the New England coast when 
fogs and east winds are making men ask 
whether life is worth living, the everglades 
of Florida are brilliant with tropical flowers, 
and the sky of Southern California is cloudless. 

And in these different environments dif- 
ferent types of men have been bred. The 
New England type and the Southern type 
have been specially definite in their diver- 
sities and exceptionally influential in shaping 
the affairs of the country. New England 
was settled by men and women of resolute 
will, strong convictions, self-denying frugality 

296 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

and industry , with a great regard for education. 
The climate was rigorous and the soil exacted 
full payment in toil for every ounce of prod- 
uct. Family life was singularly pure and 
unworldly; integrity, self-reliance and the 
habit of work were fundamental in the edu- 
cation of children. Independence of judg- 
ment was carried to an extreme, and no 
section of the country has bred so many re- 
formers and rebels against conventions, ready 
to stand alone if need be for a principle. 
In almost every New England village there 
will still be found a recluse, who lives by him- 
self because he cannot make the compromise 
with absolute freedom which living with 
others would involve. The New Englander 
has been the founder of colleges, the organizer 
of churches, the leader of ethical movements. 
In the South, on the other hand, the climate 
is milder, the soil more responsive. There 
is far more activity in the saddle and with the 
gun, and social life has filled a much larger 
place in the sum total of living. There 
has been less seriousness of spirit, though no 
less power of sacrifice. Manners have been 

297 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

more gracious, though they have expressed 
no greater readiness to help than the more 
restrained New Englander has felt. A more 
relaxed temper has made life less strenuous 
than in New England; and while religious 
faith has been more conservative its pressure 
on social habits has been more lightly borne. 

The people of the West bear the impress 
of both sections, but have developed types of 
their own ; they have the New England faith 
in education, but they have shaped their 
universities with a free hand to meet their 
own conditions ; they stand together in all 
times of need and in all enterprises for the 
common benefit with uncalculating loyalty 
and generosity; they have the strong social 
instinct of the South, but they are far more 
democratic in spirit and habit. The some- 
what rigid outlines of the New England type 
are blurred in the West, while the easy-going 
Southern habit is reenforced by fresh energy 
and the passion for success. Manners are 
unconventionally cordial. 

The landscape of the country is on a vast 
scale and presents certain broad divisions 

298 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

which have played their part in the develop- 
ment of the nation. The Atlantic seaboard 
is a long stretch of comparatively level and 
arable country from Maine in the North to 
Florida at the South. In this belt are the 
older cities and communities; the stubborn 
but well-worked farms of New England; 
the broad fertility of New York and Pennsyl- 
vania; the garden-like fruit farms of Dela- 
ware and Maryland ; the naturally productive 
soil of Virginia, and the rice and cotton fields 
of South Carolina. At the back of this long 
stretch of comparatively level strip of country 
rises a range of mountains running from North 
to South, and, in the earlier days, forming a 
formidable barrier to the growth of the colonies 
westward. From the western slope of these 
mountains there stretches a vast tract of 
country which the Mississippi and its tribu- 
taries first opened to the world ; an empire 
within the continent ; a thousand miles and 
more of fertile soil which was once largely 
prairie country and is now a vast community 
of farms with large and intensely active cities 
as distributing centers. Where the prairies 

299 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

— level, fertile and. in the spring, radiant with 
flowers — end the plains begun, at a much 
higher altitude and with a colder and dryer 
climate. They were formerly ranges over 
which wild cattle roamed ; later domesti- 
cated cattle were driven hither and thither 
over a great stretch of unoccupied country 
which is now made fertile by irrigation and 
divided into great cattle farms. This tract 
of country still in the early stages of develop- 
ment ends at the foothills of the Rocky 
Mountains, which traverse the continent from 
North to South, and slope westward to the 
Pacific. 

An American artist of distinction has said 
of the noble figure of Buddha at Kamakura : 
"It is not a little thing made big, like our 
modern colossal statues ; it has always been 
big, and would be so if reduced to life size." 
The figure, in other words, is not simply 
large; it is great. It was conceived on a 
great scale and was executed with a commen- 
surate boldness and power. Size of itself 
is not significant ; it may be mere extension of 
surface, a vast landscape without composition. 

300 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

There is a radical difference between size 
and scale. America is not simply a large 
country; it is, speaking geographically, a great 
country, a country fashioned on a great scale. 
If the continent is studied in elevation, it will 
show diversities of structure — composition, 
as the painters would call it — as clearly as 
Japan, Italy or England. It is not, as some 
people seem to imagine, a vast monotony of 
prairie and plain ; it is a continent of mani- 
fold diversities of landscape. 

The scale on which the country is molded 
is an element which has deeply impressed 
the imagination of the people from the be- 
ginning and has deeply affected their history. 
Bryant, the earliest American poet of im- 
portance, gave his verse an elemental quality 
and conveyed a sense of the mystery which 
inheres in vastness. It may be that the 
tendency to moralization, which Dr. Nitobe 
has noted in the closing lines of the fine 
verses "To a Waterfowl," and which he rightly 
says no Japanese poet would have felt it 
necessary to add, was a refuge from the 
almost overwhelming sense of vastness on 

301 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

the American continent. In the presence of 
a landscape of such extent and majesty 
men of imagination are driven to offset the 
mass or weight of earth with assertions of 
the supremacy of the spirit. And it is a 
significant fact about American literature 
that its notes have been idealistic and al- 
truistic; it has lacked so far the solidity and 
physical basis, so to speak, of the older 
literatures, but it has had notable purity of 
tone and elevation of thought. On the bleak 
New England coasts in the days of the first 
migration, on the level sweep of prairie country 
in the time of the second migration, on the 
edges of the Grand Canyon or in the lonely 
gorges of the Rocky Mountains or of the 
Sierra Nevadas to-day, men take refuge 
from the sense of insignificance in the asser- 
tion of their spiritual superiority. 

The scale on which the continent is molded 
has laid on Americans a task of almost crushing 
magnitude. The work of exploration and 
settlement, begun almost three centuries 
ago, is still incomplete. The transcontinental 
railways were constructed by men many of 

302 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

whom are still living, and the disappearance 
of the frontier is a matter of the last ten years ; 
frontier conditions still continue in large 
sections of the country, and vast tracts of 
land are still to be settled and developed. 
The work of settlement has involved con- 
tinuous toil and almost continuous danger ; 
and the foundations of every new community 
have been laid in self-denial, self-sacrifice, 
heroic work and indomitable hope. Ameri- 
cans have been criticized for the slowness 
with which their art has developed ; but their 
critics forget the preoccupation of a task of 
colossal magnitude, the absorption of energy 
and strength involved in reclaiming a con- 
tinent and converting it into three thousand 
miles of practically continuous farms ; with 
the building of roads, making of tools and 
creation of governmental, educational and 
social institutions, which have been involved 
in this development. 

Emerson has said in effect that the most 
valuable product of a farm is not crops but 
character, and that men take out of the earth 
much more than they put into it. The con- 

303 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

version of a continent into a home has largely 
shaped American character and must be 
taken into account in any study of their life. 
It has exalted work into something like a 
religion ; it has discredited the idler ; it has 
awakened the active qualities and stimulated 
self-reliance, self-respect and the passion for 
personal independence. In every country 
the owners of land have great influence; 
in America they form a very large propor- 
tion of the population, and the able_men who 
are the managers of the business of the 
country from offices and banks in the cities 
are largely drawn from those who were born 
on farms. The productivity of the American 
farms for 1912 was nine billion five hundred 
million dollars, an increase of about one 
hundred and forty per cent during the 
last fifteen years. And now that scientific 
methods of farming are being introduced, 
and the betterment of agriculture has become 
part of the business of the government, under 
the direction of experts, it is impossible to 
predict the wealth-producing capacity of 
American farms in the near future. The pro- 

304 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

duction of coal, iron, oil, copper, silver has 
shown a commensurate increase. Americans 
are often accused of boasting because they 
quote such stupendous figures in describing 
the resources of the country; but it is im- 
possible to ignore these figures, because they 
are of great significance in the life of the 
country. They mean not only wealth but 
energy, ability, opportunity, a heavy tax on 
time and thought and strength. 

To the charge that he is vulgarly rich the 
American might plead his inability to escape 
wealth because he has inherited an estate 
which is so enormously productive ; he has 
shown only the sagacity which other active 
races would have shown under the same con- 
ditions. Those conditions have laid a task on 
his shoulders which has absorbed his energy 
and strength for a century and has drawn from 
the direct service of the State many men of 
ability who, in other countries, would have 
been political leaders. In America public life, 
as has been pointed out, is not synonymous 
with politics; it is shared by all men and 
women who contribute largely to the general 

305 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

welfare : heads of colleges, philanthropists, 
men of affairs, builders of railroads, organiz- 
ers of industry. There are in America men 
of affairs who have shown the daring that 
in the sixteenth century would have made 
them great explorers and adventurers, the 
imagination that would have made them 
poets, the breadth of view and the sense of 
things to come that in other countries would 
have made them statesmen. 

It sometimes happens that the heir to 
a vast property is compelled to devote 
the earlier years of his possession to 
the organization and development of his 
estate; other interests may call him loudly 
and his heart may respond to their call, but 
for the moment his work confronts him with 
such urgency of demand that to leave it 
undone would be to turn his back on that 
which Carry le declared has the supreme 
claim on a man — the duty that lies next 
him. 

The charge of materialism, which has be- 
come the stock in trade of many critics of 
American society, is largely made, as is most 

306 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

criticism of nations by foreign observers, 
from a very superficial knowledge of condi- 
tions. It may not be a matter of credit to 
America that it has become a very rich 
country, and it is certainly true that some 
Americans have obtruded that fact on the 
attention of the world too insistently; but it 
is a matter of simple justice to remember that 
if America had failed to develop the resources 
of the continent, the same critics would have 
put her among those races which either fall 
a prey to more energetic peoples or furnish 
standard illustrations of national inefficiency. 
The sense of still greater possibilities of 
development pervades the air of America and 
finds expression in the speech, the imagina- 
tion, the temperament of the people. An 
American artist, on the wall of a library build- 
ing, has striven to represent the spirit of the 
people by a procession of men, women and 
children. They are all marching together, 
with eager expectation on their upturned 
faces, and the morning light shines on them. 
It was a happy inspiration to paint hope, not 
as an allegorical figure, but as an impulse 

307 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

which is like martial music to a moving 
host. In America the future is not an 
indefinite apprehension ; it is an ardent ex- 
pectation: a promise not only of ample pros- 
perity but of a fuller, more interesting, more 
satisfying life. 

And so the thought of the American to-day 
centers more and more on the well-being of 
the coming generation; on the protection of 
women and children from oppressive working 
hours and unwholesome industrial condi- 
tions; on securing cleanliness, light and air 
in the homes of the poor; educational op- 
portunities ample enough for those who want 
the most thorough technical training and for 
those who must begin at an early age to 
care for themselves ; the husbanding of the 
resources of the country for the benefit of 
future generations. Americans have been 
prodigal givers of land, forests, mines, water 
power ; they have surrendered to private enter- 
prises sources of great public revenue. They 
have now reversed this spendthrift policy; 
henceforth, these resources will be developed 
and managed by private hands on generous 

308 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

terms ; but a proper return will be required in 
order that the national property may bear 
its share of the national expenses. 

The pressure of work which must be done at 
once necessarily involved much provisional 
building of houses and railroads in the country, 
and has compelled the almost universal re- 
building which is going on in all sections. The 
same pressure of work and the extent of the 
territory to be covered have made careless- 
ness, even slovenliness, far too prevalent in 
America, in most parts of which the neatness 
which characterizes England and Belgium, 
for instance, is conspicuously lacking. Here 
again the element of scale and the shortness 
of time in which the work has been done must 
be taken into account. 

The impress of scale is seen not only in 
American aims and character but in its art and 
literature. In American books there is a new 
kind of passion for Nature ; not the exquisite 
Greek sense of detail which makes Theocritus 
both the poet and the natural historian of 
Sicily; not Wordsworth's mystical feeling of 
the presence of the soul suffusing the world 

309 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

with intimations of immortality ; not the sensi- 
tive response of Tennyson to the elusive and 
fleeting no less than to the obvious aspect of a 
world grown familiar with use and intimate 
through toil and sorrow; but a sense of 
the vastness, sublimity and loneliness of 
Nature; the detachment of a landscape not 
yet humanized by cultivation and by paths 
across the fields. Fuji, the Incomparable, 
rises uncompanioned into the lonely sky, 
a vast altar set afar in unbroken silence ; the 
highest peaks in America rise out of great 
ranges of hills, in a landscape so vast that 
they can be approached only with peril and 
hardship. If the "Lines on Tintern Abbey " are 
compared with Lanier's "Marshes of Glynn," 
or the companionable notebook of White of 
Selbourne with Thoreau's "Maine Woods," or 
Jefferies' "Wild Life in a Southern County" 
with Mr. Burroughs' records of Nature in 
America, the difference in scale between a 
small and highly cultivated country like 
England and a vast and still largely unculti- 
vated country like the United States will 
stand out with striking distinctness. 

310 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

Nor does the influence of the scale of re- 
sources end with a report of its effect on 
temperament and achievement; it must be 
reckoned with in any attempt to understand 
the financial development of the last forty 
years. These four decades of growth and 
prosperity have brought with them tempta- 
tions to the abuse of success to which the men 
of no other race have been subjected. The 
population has grown from thirty-eight and a 
half millions in 1870 to ninety-three or four 
millions in 1912. Three years ago the wealth 
of the country was estimated at $142,000,000,- 
000. These figures are not quoted because 
they afford any standard of national ability 
or any measure of national greatness; but 
simply because they suggest the strain to 
which the government of the United States 
and the American character have been sub- 
jected. They do not justify boasting, and 
to-day there is very little inclination in 
America to print them in large letters on the 
title page of current history; nor, on the 
other hand, are they to be apologized for. A 
nation, like an individual, is not called upon 

311 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

to explain events or experiences which have 
been beyond its control. It is true, Americans 
have not neglected the business which has 
fallen into their hands, but it is also true that 
Nature, the silent partner in the American 
enterprise, has furnished the capital and the 
material from which the tools have been made. 
In no other country, in so short a time, has 
such an immense acreage of fertility been 
opened and such an army of workers responded 
to the call of opportunity. 

The result has been a stimulation of business 
activity which has intoxicated many men of 
naturally sober temper. When a great crop 
is to be gathered in and the weather is uncer- 
tain, men work, not only overtime but all the 
time. In the United States a flood tide of 
prosperity found the old channels of law and 
method inadequate, and men have been swept 
along without any clear realization of the 
speed with which they were moving. The 
necessity of handling efficiently the details 
of enormous business operations and of using 
vast sums of money has brought into existence 
combinations of a magnitude undreamed of in 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

the earlier history of the country and the 
radical effects of which in restricting competi- 
tion and diminishing individual opportunity 
were foreseen neither by lawmakers nor by 
financiers ; and the country has slowly 
awakened to the fact that it must devise some 
working basis for vast wealth in a few hands 
in a democratic society. 

In this rushing tide of activity some men 
have been swept from their moral moorings, 
and the speculative and gambling spirit, 
which is always stimulated by universal 
prosperity and from which all countries have 
suffered, has tempted some men to unscrupu- 
lous use of wealth and to downright dis- 
honesty ; but the fact that the credit system 
is the basis of enormous transactions and that, 
while it is sometimes extended beyond the 
limits of safety, it is so rarely abused that the 
confidence of the country in the fundamental 
integrity of the business community is never 
seriously disturbed, and that the percentage of 
loss in handling enormous investments and 
trust funds is so small as to be almost negligible, 
furnish the best possible evidence of the sound- 

313 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

ness of American business men. The finances 
of the government from the beginning have 
been managed with conspicuous integrity and 
the losses through the dishonesty of govern- 
ment officials have been so small that they 
may be ignored. 

Whoever reads the report of corporate op- 
pression in the United States during the last 
four decades and does not take into account 
the swift and unparalleled increase in wealth, 
not only does a great injustice to the country, 
but fails to understand the situation as com- 
pletely as Gladstone and Carlyle failed to 
understand the War between the States 
fifty years ago. 

This prosperity has not gone wholly into 
luxury, though it has increased the cost of 
living in America and has led to great elabora- 
tion of what may be called the machinery of 
living, to extravagance and to display; it 
has endowed education and scientific investi- 
gation on a scale unprecedented in the 
history of education. To some of these 
gifts the American public, always quick to see 
the humorous aspects of current events, lias 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

taken a somewhat cynical attitude and has 
plainly hinted that some gifts to colleges and 
nniversities have been attempts at restitution, 
and that the multimillionaire of to-day who 
endows a university is the modern suc- 
cessor of the medieval baron who, after 
pillaging a city and putting its innocent 
inhabitants to the sword, made his peace 
with Heaven by building a church. There is 
as much human nature in America as there 
is in England, Germany or Japan, and there 
is the same partial application of ideals to 
action as in these older countries ; but the 
most obvious interest of the American, accord- 
ing to the most capable observers, is his inter- 
est in education. It is one of the expressions 
of his faith in the future which is shared by 
men of all stations in life. The gifts of private 
persons are on a great scale, the appropriations 
of states and cities are on the same scale ; the 
citizen expects to give his children every 
educational advantage within his means; 
and in America, as in Japan, no sacrifice is 
too great to send the boy to college and the 
university. The newly arrived immigrant in 

315 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

America does not rest until his children are in 
the schools. Many foreigners think the magic 
phrase in America is "getting on" ; but they 
are mistaken; that phrase is a compact de- 
scription of the prosperity which is, in the 
minds of men and women who have children 
to guide, a basis for " getting up." It is a kind 
of national tradition, even among men who 
have made great fortunes with little aid from 
education, that children must have larger op- 
portunities than their parents and that in 
point of opportunity each generation must 
stand on the shoulders of the generation which 
precedes it. 

For among Americans education is not only 
a discipline, a training; it is also a symbol. 
It stands for the larger freedom which polit- 
ical liberty foreshadows ; it means living an 
ampler life in a larger world. It is one form 
of that practical idealism, that passion for 
human betterment, which sent a host of 
men and women to the New World for con- 
science' sake; men and women who opened 
schools and founded colleges before they w T ere 
safely housed in the wilderness, and have 

316 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

continued to build schools and colleges as 
fast as they advanced the frontier toward the 
Pacific. 

They have also built churches, for religion 
has been one of the major motives in American 
civilization; a symbol of idealism and a rule 
of life; and the church has been a center of 
social and altruistic activity. In every village 
there is a substantial church building; often 
more than are justified by the population; 
and there is an academy or high school. 
Puritanism in the New England colonies was 
not only a form of faith but a political order 
as well ; membership in the church was a 
qualification for voting. The contemporaries 
of Milton and Cromwell held their faith 
with an intensity of conviction which tolerated 
no differences of opinion. But before the 
adoption of the Constitution the religious 
tests had been abolished and freedom of 
worship recognized as a fundamental right of 
every citizen. There is no principle which 
Americans hold more tenaciously than this, 
nor is there one which they guard with more 
vigilance. Every attempt to use public funds 

317 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

for sectarian purposes or to secure govern- 
ment aid for such purpose is met by a storm of 
protest. The government stands absolutely 
neutral in its relation to religion, and the sepa- 
ration of the State from the Church is complete. 
The name of the Supreme Being does not occur 
in the Constitution, and government institu- 
tions of all kinds are entirely free from control 
by any kind of ecclesiastical organization. 

The American people have always been and 
are to-day a religious people. They formed 
the habit early in their history of suspending 
business one day in seven, and of keeping 
Sunday not only as a day of rest but as a day 
of worship; and, while they have ceased to 
be Sabbatarians in the rigid sense and have 
come to believe that the Sabbath was made 
for man and not man for the Sabbath, they 
still guard the freedom of the day from the 
intrusion of all business which is not neces- 
sary for human safety and comfort, and they 
attend religious services in large numbers. 
They have no possession of greater value from 
a religious or domestic point of view or as a 
means of public health, of wholesome out-of- 

318 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

door life, of the rest that "reknits the ravelled 
sleeve of care," and gives workers of all kinds 
renewal of energy, than the weekly holiday 
which their ancestors, for two thousand years, 
have set aside for the things of the spirit. 
One of their wisest thinkers has touched the 
secret of the Sunday peace which falls on the 
rushing industrial life of America and is dear 
to Americans of every creed in these eloquent 
words : When the seventh day dawns, white 
with the worship of uncounted centuries, "the 
cathedral music of history breathes through 
it a psalm to our solitude." Like a quiet 
path, through which all one's ancestors have 
walked, this day, set apart to rest and worship, 
runs back to the far beginnings of Christian 
civilization and is one of its most precious 
gifts to the world. 

A majority of the people of the United 
States have some religious connection, and the 
churches are the center of devotional, chari- 
table and altruistic activity of many kinds. 
Professor Miinsterberg, a critical student 
of American conditions, has said that "the 
entire American people are in fact profoundly 

319 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

religious, and have been, from the day when 
the Pilgrim Fathers landed, down to the 
present moment." In nearly every docu- 
ment which conveyed authority to discoverers, 
explorers and settlers in the New World the 
Christian religion was recognized, and in a 
decision rendered in 1891 by the Supreme 
Court of the United States these words are 
found: "If we pass beyond these matters 
to a view of American life as expressed by its 
laws, its business, its customs and its society, 
we find everywhere a clear recognition of the 
same truth. Among other matters note the 
following: The form of oath universally pre- 
vailing, concluding with an appeal to the Al- 
mighty ; the custom of opening sessions of all 
deliberate bodies with prayer; the prefatory 
words of all wills: 'In the name of God, 
Amen'; the laws respecting the observance of 
the Sabbath with a general cessation of all 
secular business, and the closing of courts, 
legislatures and similar public assemblies on 
that day ; the churches and church organiza- 
tions which abound in every city, town and 
hamlet ; the multitude of charitable organiza- 

320 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

tions existing everywhere under Christian aus- 
pices ; the gigantic missionary associations, 
with general support, and aiming to establish 
Christian Missions in every quarter of the 
globe. These and many other matters which 
might be noticed add a volume of unofficial 
declarations to the mass of organic utterances 
that this is a Christian nation." 

In the American temperament, in spite of 
its practical energy and consuming activity, 
there is a deep spring of idealism which has 
so far found inadequate expression in art, but 
has been an abundant source of national 
inspiration in religious activity, education 
and practical helpfulness. The division of 
Christian people into sects, the rigid defini- 
tions which their faith has often had in terms of 
traditional theology, the intense feeling with 
which creeds have been not only held but im- 
posed upon others, the rapid spread of crude 
mysticism combined with empirical uses, the 
attraction of a bald literalism for half -educated 
people, are the excesses, the one-sided expres- 
sions, of a deep and lasting interest in the 
ultimate questions of human destiny. In the 
v 321 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

busiest of countries there is one question 
which is never silenced — the question of 
immortality. 

The religious attitude of the American, which 
was once largely subjective is now largely 
objective ; and the test of faith is no longer 
the acceptance of a definition but some form 
of service of humanity. There are certain 
facts which as a believer in a historical reli- 
gion the Christian in America holds as funda- 
mental, but the value of a man's religion is 
estimated in terms of social service. The 
Puritan emphasis on conduct as the only 
convincing evidence of the religious spirit 
makes itself felt more distinctly to-day than 
ever before in the history of the country; 
but the weight of that emphasis has been 
transferred from the individual to society, 
and the impulse which is stirring Americans 
as they have not been stirred since the war 
which ended fifty years ago, and which is 
behind the leading political parties, is the 
determination to make industrial and social 
conditions conform to the standards of Chris- 
tian ethics. Seventeenth-century Puritanism 

322 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

insisted that a man should save his own 
soul ; twentieth-century Puritanism insists 
that he shall save society by creating condi- 
tions which shall help men to live wholesome 
lives as human beings. 

There has been no more generous and un- 
selfish example of the desire of the American 
to give the world the best he has than the 
missionary movement, which took an organized 
form in Williams College one hundred and 
seven years ago ; a noble adventure in faith 
and service which has made the world familiar 
with the highest types of American character ; 
an organized friendship of the spirit which has 
translated the great words "Peace on earth 
and good will to men" into all languages. 

The country has always been the home of 
the reforming spirit, and in their most com- 
fortable days Americans have never been 
satisfied. They grew restive under the 
existence of slavery, which was carried to 
America at a time when it was accepted as a 
normal condition in the greater part of the 
world; they finally destroyed it by an im- 
mense sacrifice of life and property. They 

323 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

have not yet succeeded in solving the difficult 
problem of controlling the manufacture and 
sale of intoxicating liquor, but they have 
never ceased to make experiments and they 
have won the fight in many of the states. 
For many years a vigorous agitation was 
conducted against Mormonism until the plural 
marriage was heavily penalized. It is im- 
possible to open an American newspaper with- 
out reading reports of the proceedings of some 
organization to protect women and children 
from industrial oppression, to open schools in 
the slums, to build or endow hospitals, to 
secure playgrounds for children ; in a word, 
in manifold ways to make life more whole- 
some and happy for the less fortunate and 
helpless members of society. The American 
who does not belong to half a dozen organiza- 
tions of this kind and is not working on half 
a dozen committees is a rare person. The 
country is ravaged by societies formed to do 
good to somebody ; men of means, large or 
small, are besieged with appeals for money 
for charitable uses, for education, for public 
purposes. In 1912 the amount given by 

324 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

individuals for education, for religious uses, 
for general beneficence, not including pro- 
visions of all kinds for the poor, exceeded, 
according to a report reprinted in a Tokyo 
newspaper, $315,000,000. There have been 
humorous proposals to organize a society for 
the suppression of philanthropy and reform; 
but Americans are every year giving more 
time and money for altruistic uses. 

One of the ablest American politicians has 
said that if a political movement assumes a 
moral aspect, nothing can resist it. The one 
appeal which arouses enthusiasm in Americans 
to-day is the ethical appeal, and the men who 
are now the leaders of public opinion are 
teachers of public morals. Those who have 
not understood the tasks laid on Americans 
in making a home for men and women of all 
races in the New World, nor the temptations 
which have assailed them, have so often re- 
peated the charge that Americans are materi- 
alists that Europe has fallen into the habit of 
automatically reiterating a phrase which, to 
one who understands the temper of the 
people of the United States, is not only mis- 

325 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

leading, but a caricature of the American 
spirit. What makes a man a materialist ? 
Not dealing with material substances and 
forms and physical forces, for the vast major- 
ity of men spend their lives in patient toil with 
the stubborn stuff in which and with which 
the whole world works. One does not call 
the architect a materialist because he handles 
enormous masses of stone or iron, or the 
painter a materialist because he is soiled with 
pigments, or the musician a materialist because 
he uses instruments of wood and ivory and 
metal. A materialist is a man who works 
with materials and is satisfied with them ; 
whose soul is colored by the things in which he 
deals, "like the dyer's hand," to recall Shake- 
speare. Those who know America know that 
it is a national peculiarity to be satisfied with 
nothing. Americans are not discontented, 
but they are dissatisfied; they always want 
something better than they possess ; they are 
eager to get the best life offers ; as soon as 
they get money, they want education, oppor- 
tunities of travel, art. 

They are charged with the willingness to 
326 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

sell their souls for money, — a kind of barter 
which is extensively carried on in all parts of 
the world. But Americans care far less for 
money than many other races. The attrac- 
tions of business on a great scale for the 
energetic American is the opportunity of 
putting forth his full strength, of matching 
himself against obstacles and overcoming 
them, of measuring his ability against the 
ability of competitors ; the excitement of 
playing the game interests him more than 
winning the stakes. When money in large 
quantities comes into his hands he does not 
hoard it; misers are almost unknown in 
America; he spends it freely; he often 
lavishes it on his family, and harms his chil- 
dren by his unwise generosity; he gives it 
away in increasing amounts. The great for- 
tunes which have subjected him to sharp criti- 
cism in America have made vast contributions 
to public uses. 

Contrary to the opinion based on the 
traditional ignorance of American conditions 
which is now slowly yielding to the pressure 
of knowledge, the American is very emotional 

827 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

and governed largely by sentiment. The 
terrible struggle between the States, in which 
nearly 800,000 men were killed or wounded, 
and the cost of which was probably not less 
than $4,000,000,000, not including the destruc- 
tion of slave property in the South to the 
extent of $2,000,000,000, showed that when 
sentiment is involved, the Americans do not 
count the cost. That is one of the qualities 
which reveal the ineradicable and controlling 
idealism which has been a dominating ele- 
ment in America since the first colonists 
braved the dangers of a new world for con- 
science' sake. That idealism has not yet 
found adequate expression in their art; but 
it has shaped American institutions. The 
government is the most daring credit system 
the world has ever known; it rests on the 
assumption that men without regard to edu- 
cation or social condition can be trusted with 
the management of the most important affairs 
of life. 

Americans have regarded their freedom and 
their opportunities as a trust for humanity 
and have shared them with men and women 

328 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 

of the whole western world. They have made 
provision for universal education; they have 
responded to every appeal for aid from other 
nations in times of calamity ; their fleet went 
instantly to the rescue of Messina, and they 
organized rebuilding on a large scale; they 
bore the burden of a war to give Cuba her 
freedom; the story of their diplomacy in 
Japan and China need not be rehearsed here ; 
their service to the Philippines is recognized 
by every traveler; to-day they have under- 
taken to reorganize their business so as to 
bring it into accord with the spirit of their 
institutions and with the Christian ethics they 
profess. Their faults are recorded in the 
newspapers of the world. They do not ask 
for charity of judgment ; they must be judged 
by what they have done and are trying to do 
under the circumstances in which they have 
been placed ; and their tendency to take a 
cheerful view of things induces them to hope 
that the world will sometime take the trouble 
to understand these circumstances. Whether 
it does or does not, the Americans will con- 
tinue to strive to achieve a solution not only 

329 



AMERICAN IDEALS 

of the political problem, which Matthew 
Arnold declared they had solved, but of the 
human problem, which is infinitely more com- 
plex and difficult, and for which no race or 
nation has yet found a final solution. 



330 



INDEX 



Adams, Herbert, portrait busts 
by, 209. 

Adams, John, literary work of, 
109. 

Adams, John Quincy, President 
and Harvard professor, 246. 

Adams, Samuel, defense of rights 
of Americans written by, 107. 

Advanced work in American 
universities, 257 ff. 

Albany Capitol, paintings by 
W. M. Hunt in the, 199-200. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, tribute 
to work of, 185. 

Allen, James Lane, literary art 
of, 175. 

Allston, Washington, 196. 

America, misunderstanding of, by 
foreigners, 6-7 ; fundamental 
differences between political 
and social structure and that 
of older countries, 13 ff. ; sig- 
nificance of discovery of, 39- 
40; the settlement of, 42-60; 
colonies of, experiment sta- 
tions in science of government, 
61 ff. ; mistaken policy in man- 
agement of colonies of, 62-67; 
condition of, at time colonists 
won independence, 68-70; po- 
litical organization formulated 
for, 70-81, 274 ff. ; develop- 
ment of the continent by the 
new nation, 81-90; literature 



of, in provincial period, 91-127 ; 
sectional literature of, 128-155 ; 
national literature of, following 
War between the States, 156 ff . ; 
architecture in, 189-194 ; prog- 
ress in painting in, 194-203; 
sculpture in, 203-210; music 
in, 210-213; education and 
life in school and college, 214- 
244; universities of, 245-257; 
opportunities for advanced and 
research work, 257-266; as 
the land of opportunity, 285- 
290 ; qualities of neighborliness 
and good-fellowship in, 290- 
294 ; effects of different climates 
and environments of, 296-298 ; 
influence of vastness of land- 
scape, 298 ff. 

Americanisms, origins of phrases 
called, 98-99. 

"American Political Ideas," 
quoted, 75-76. 

Americans, interest and admira- 
tion felt by, for the Japanese 
nation, 1-2; possibility of 
interpretation of, by an Ameri- 
can writer, 11-12; attitude of, 
toward education, 14-16, 23- 
25, 214 ff., 316; political in- 
stitutions favored by, 17-18; 
suitability of form of govern- 
ment to, 18-19; consciousness 
of perils of system, 19-20; risks 
of misrepresentation and mis- 
understanding felt by, 20-23; 



331 



INDEX 



talking and writing by, with- 
out preparation, 26 ff. ; news- 
papers of, and wrong impres- 
sions given by, 28-33; racial 
strains in composition of, 42- 
60, 267-269; clinging of, to 
the English language, 96-99; 
literary foundations of, 99-102; 
advance of the national spirit 
among, resulting from the 
War between the States, 154, 
156; trait of individual ini- 
tiative in, 281 ; self-reliance of, 
281-283 ; unlimited opportuni- 
ties for, 285-287; qualities of 
helpfulness and hope, 288; 
neighborliness and good-fellow- 
ship supreme among qualities 
of, 290-294; varieties of, with 
variations in climate and en- 
vironment, 295-300; effect of 
great scale of country upon, 
300 ff . ; explanation of charge 
of materialism brought against, 
306; attitude toward religion, 
317-323; the reforming spirit 
among, 323-325 ; emotion and 
sentiment of, 327-328; the 
promise of further progress by, 
328-330. 

Andover, academy at, 225. 

Architecture, colonial, 189-190; 
chaotic period following War 
between the States, 190-194; 
modern improvement in, 194. 

Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 115, 
330. 

Athletics, interest in, at American 
colleges, 238-243. 

"Autobiography," Franklin's, 118. 

Automobiles, as a means of na- 
tional development, 158-159. 

"Awakening of Helena Richie," 
181. 



B 



Ball, Thomas, work in sculpture 
by, 208. 

Baltimore, the Lords, 56. 

Bancroft, George, 127, 170. 

Bartlett, the "Lafayette" and 
"Genius of Man" of, 209. 

"Bathers," W. M. Hunt's, 199. 

"Battle Hymn of the Republic, 
The," 154. 

Beaux, Cecilia, 203. 

Berea College, 283. 

Bible, results of translation of, 
45-47; as a vitalizing power 
with American colonists, 101- 
102. 

"Biglow Papers," Lowell's, 138. 

Blair, James, 218. 

"Blithedale Romance," Haw- 
thorne's, 144. 

Books of early American settlers, 
94-96. 

Boston, music in, 212. 

Boston Latin School, 217. 

"Boy and the Butterfly," W. M. 
Hunt's, 199. 

Boyle, "Stone Age" of, 209. 

"BracebridgeHall," Irving's, 122. 

Brewster, William, 94. 

Bringhurst, "Kiss of Eternity" 
of, 209-210. 

Brown, Charles Brockden, 145. 

Brownell, critical essays by, 186- 
187. 

Brunetiere, on American dis- 
tances, 157. 

Bryant, William Cullen, discus- 
sion of work of, 128, 133-135 ; 
influence of vast scale of 
America on poetry of, 301-302. 

Bryce, James, on the American 
Constitution, 74 ; on the West 
of America, 83. 



332 



INDEX 



Bryn Mawr College, 237. 
Buddha, thoughts inspired by 

figure of, 300. 
Burroughs, John, 186; nature 

writing of, contrasted with that 

of Jefferies, 310. 
Butler, Nicholas Murray, on the 

Puritan strain in Americans, 

50-51. 



Cable, George W., 175. 

Cabot, John, 40. 

California, discovery of gold in, 

89. 
Carnegie Endowment for In- 
ternational Peace, 265-266. 
Carnegie Foundation for the 

Advancement of Teaching, 263- 

264. 
Carnegie Institution of Washing- 
ton, 262. 
Carolinas, settlement of the, 57- 

58. 
"Certain Rich Man," White's, 

181. 
"Chanting Cherubs," Green- 

ough's, 204. 
Chatham, Lord, 109. 
Chicago, University of, age of, 

249 ; endowment of, 250. 
Children, American poetry which 

appeals to, 135-136. 
Civil War, the American, 8, 153, 

158. 
Clark University, 254; teaching 

of pedagogy at, 258-259. 
Clemens, Samuel N., 176. 
Cleveland, Grover, 15. 
Climate, effect of, on people in 

different sections of America, 

296-298. 
Colby, Frank, 186. 



Colleges, the first American, 
217 ff . ; courses and system of 
education in, 226 ff . ; elective 
system in, 232-234 ; for women, 
236-238; devotion to sports 
and athletics at, 238-242; 
social life at, 242-244. 

Colonial system, mistakes of the 
old, 61-67. 

Columbia University, gradual 
development and present size 
and endowment of, 249-250; 
School of Mines at, 258; 
Teachers College at, 258. 

Columbus, Christopher, 40. 

Comenius, Bishop, quotation 
from, 227. 

" Commemoration Ode," Lowell's, 
137. 

Commerce, early, between Europe 
and Asia, 36-38. 

Commissioner of Education, na- 
tional, 223. 

Composers, American, 213. 

"Conquest of Granada," Irving's, 
122, 169. 

Constitution, the Federal, 74-77 ; 
debates and discussion preced- 
ing the, 112; form of govern- 
ment created by, 275-276. 

Continental Congress, the, 69. 

Cooper, J. F., career and work of, 
144-148. 

Copley, John, 194, 196. 

Cosmopolitan life, fiction dealing 
with, 177-178. 

Cotton gin, invention of the, 83. 

Crothers, Samuel McChord, 186. 



Dallin, "Signal of Peace" of, 2C9. 

Distances in America, Brunetiere 

on supposed effects of, 157. 



838 



INDEX 



"Dixie," song, 155. 

Dutch, contribution of, to Ameri- 
can citizenship and ideals, 
51-55. 

Dvorak, New World Symphony 
of, 213. 

E 

Education, attitude of Americans 
as a nation toward, 14-16, 23- 
25, 214 ff. ; National Bureau 
of, 223; endowments for en- 
couraging advanced, 262-266 ; 
gifts of the wealthy to, 314-315 ; 
viewed by Americans as a 
symbol of the larger freedom, 
316-317. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 115-116. 

Elective system in colleges, 232- 
234 ; reasons for introduction, 
256. 

Eliot, Charles W., 246-247. 

Elwell, "Ceres" and "Kronos" 
of, 209. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15 ; liter- 
ary production of, 138-139; 
on America as the country of 
opportunity, 285. 

England, influence of universities 
of, on American colleges, 238- 
239, 254-255, 256-257. 

English language, American 
settlers and the, 96-98. 

Essay, the, in modern American 
literature, 186-187. 

"Evangeline," Longfellow's, 125. 

Everett, Edward, 127, 246. 

Exeter, academy at, 225. 



Farmers, increasing importance of 

American, 304-305. 
Farragut, Saint Gaudens' statue 

of, 207. 



Federalist party, 79. 

Federalist, The, 113. 

Fichte, quoted, 8. 

Fiction, writers of modern, 172- 

182. 
Financial development of America, 

311. 
Fiske, John, 172. 
Foster, Stephen, 212. 
Foundations for research work 

and for endowment of higher 

education, 262-266. 
Fox, Charles James, 109. 
Fox, John, Jr., 176. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 15, 73, 106; 

"Autobiography" of, 118. 
"Freedom of the Will," Edwards', 

116. 
Freedom of worship in America, 

317-318. 
Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 177. 
French, Daniel, 209. 
French and Indian War, 106. 
French ideals and methods in 

University of Virginia, 220. 
Fulton, Robert, 82. 



Garland, Hamlin, 177. 

General Education Board, work 

of, 263. 
George III and the American 

colonies, 65-67. 
Georgia, types of native character 

furnished to fiction by, 176. 
Germany, influence of thought 

and literature of, on American 

culture, 126-127 ; influence of, 

on American universities, 254- 

257. 
Gladstone, W. E., Morley quoted 

on, 8. 
Goethe, quoted, 4. 



334 



INDEX 



Good-fellowship, American re- 
gard for, 290-292. 

Government, bases of the Ameri- 
can, 267 ff. ; form of political 
organization, 274-276. 

Great American Desert, 87-88. 

"Greek Slave," Powers', 204. 

Greenough, "Chanting Cherubs" 
of, 204. 

Groton School, 225. 

Group system of study in colleges, 
234. 



Hall, G. Stanley, 259. 

Hamilton, Alexander, 17-18, 73; 
great services of, to American 
government, 77 ff. ; contribu- 
tions of, to debates out of 
which the Constitution grew, 
112-113. 

Hampton Institute, 283. 

Harris, Joel Chandler, 176. 

Harte, Bret, 176. 

Harvard, John, library of, 95 ; 
founding of Harvard College 
by, 217. 

Harvard College, founding of, 
217-218; the multitude of 
courses at, 235 ; significance of 
word "university" as applied 
to, 253-254. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, contri- 
bution of, to American liter- 
ature, 141-145. 

Henry, Patrick, 110. 

Herrick, Robert, 177. 

"Hiawatha," Longfellow's, 125. 

High School, place of, in American 
scheme of education, 224-225. 

Hill School, the, 225. 

Historical literature, growth of, 
168-172. 



Holmes, O. W., literary produc- 
tion of, 139-140. 

Homer, Winslow, 202. 

"House of Mirth, The," 180. 

"House of the Seven Gables," 
144. 

Howells, William Dean, 178, 
179-180. 

"Huckleberry Finn," 176. 

Hudson, Henry, 52. 

Hudson River School of painting, 
so called, 197. 

Huguenots in America, 54-55, 58 ; 
in and about New York City, 
120. 

Hunt, William Morris, 199-200. 



Idealism found in the American 

temperament, 321. 
"Indian Hunter," Ward's, 207. 
Indians in the West, 89-90; 

schools for, 222. 
Inness, George, 198. 
Institute of Technology, Boston, 

258. 
"Iron Woman, The," 181. 
Irving, Washington, 121-123; 

historical work of, 169. 
Italy, part played by, in early 

discovery and exploration, 39. 



James, Henry, 177, 179, 180. 

Japan, interest in and admiration 
felt by Americans for, 1-2; 
difficulty experienced by for- 
eigners in understanding, 5-6 ; 
interpretation of people of, by 
Japanese writers, 11; conform- 
ability of government of, to 



335 



INDEX 



genius of its people, 18 ; polite- 
ness a matter of national disci- 
pline in, 22; richness of, in 
proverbs, 99 ; relations between 
business and science recognized 
in educational scheme of, 229 ; 
effect of training in "team 
play" shown by, 242. 

Jarvis, John" Wesley, quoted con- 
cerning early painters, 195- 
196. 

Jefferson, Thomas, 79, 109, 113- 
114; University of Virginia 
founded by, 220. 

Jewett, Sarah Orne, 177. 

Johns Hopkins University, Sidney 
Lanier at, 164 ; study of con- 
temporary history at, 171 ; 
age of, 249; establishment 
of, by private endowment, 250 ; 
significance of word "univer- 
sity" as applied to, 254. 

Johnson, Eastman, 202. 

"Journal," Woolman's, 117-118. 

Journalism in America, 28-33. 

Jumel Mansion, New York, 190. 



Kindergartens, education in, 222. 
Kipling, Rudyard, on certain 
national traits, 291. 



"Lady Baltimore," Wister's, 181. 

La Farge, John, 200-201. 

Lamb, Charles, 4. 

Land, gifts of, for educational 
purposes, 222-223 ; influence 
of owners of, 304-305. 

Landscape, effect of vastness of, 
on American character, 133- 
134. 298 ff. • C~ 



Lanier, Sidney, career and 
work of, 164-167; contrast 
between nature verse of, and 
that of Wordsworth, 310. 

Lawrenceville School, 225. 

Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper's, 
147-148. 

"Legend of Sleepy Hollow," 
123. 

Lehigh University, 254, 258. 

Leland Stanford University, es- 
tablishment of, by private en- 
dowment, 250. 

Libraries of early American 
settlers, 94-96. 

"Life of Columbus," Irving's, 
122. 

"Life on the Mississippi," 
Mark Twain's, 176. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 15 ; training 
possessed by, for the Presi- 
dency, 24 ; statue of, in Capitol, 
Washington, 206; statues in 
Lincoln Park, Chicago, and 
Rock Creek Cemetery, Wash- 
ington, 207-208. 

Liquor question, the, 324. 

Locke, John, scheme of govern- 
ment of, 57. 

Longfellow, H. W., 123-127. 

Lopez, "Sprinter" of, 209. 

Louisiana Purchase, the, 82. 

Lowell, James Russell, on Thomas 
Jefferson, 109 ; consideration of 
career and literary work of, 
136-137; on the object of 
college education, 228; an 
example of the educational 
leader as a public man, 246. 

M 

McMaster, John Bach, 172. 
Macmonnies, work of, 209. 



336 



INDEX 



MacNeil, "Sun Vow" of, 209. 
"Madam Delphine," Cable's 

175. 
Madison, James, 44, 73, 113. 
Manual training in schools, 

224. 

"Marble Faun," Hawthorne's, 

143. 
Mark Twain, 176. 

Mars Chan," Page's, 175. 
Marshall, John, 44, 80-81. 
"Marshes of Glynn," Lanier's, 

166; contrasted with "Lines 

on Tintern Abbey," 310. 
Martin, Homer D., 198, 199. 
"Maryland, My Maryland," 

154. 

Maryland, settlement of, 56- 

57. 
Materialism, charge of, brought 
against Americans, 306-307 ; 
misleading nature of charge of 
325-326. 
Matthews, Brander, 186. 
"Meh Lady," Page's, 175. 
Mercersberg Academy, 225. 
Mexican War, the, 89. 
Military Academy, United States, 

223. 
Missionary movement, the, 323. 
Monuments, shocking American 

191-192. 
Moody, W. V., 185. 
Morley, John, quoted, 8. 
Mormonism, agitation against 

324. 
Motley, J. L., 169-170. 
Mt. Holyoke College, 237. 
Mount Vernon, architecture of 

190. 
MUnsterberg, Hugo, on religious- 
ness of Americans as a people 
319-320. ' 

Murfree, Mary N., 176. 



Music, progress of America in, 

210-213. 
Musical festivals, 212. 



N 

National Bureau of Education 

223. 
Nature, effect of scale on kind of 
love shown by Americans for 
309-310. 
Naval Academy, United States, 

223. 
Negroes, schools for, 222. 
Neighborliness, value placed on, 

in America, 290-294. 
New England, the settlers of, 44- 
51 ; fiction dealing with life in, 
177; attitude in, toward edu- 
cation, 215 ; quality of people 
bred in, 296-297. 
New Netherland Company, 53. 
Newspapers, American, 28-33 ; 
daily story of humanity told in' 
184. 
New York, Dutch settlement of, 
51-55; literature which began 
m, during provincial period, 
119-123; interest in music in 
211-212. 
"New York, History of," Irvine's 

121-122. 
NHobe, Dr., criticism of Biyant's 

"To a Waterfowl " by, 301. 
Norris, Frank, 181-182. 
Novel, the modern American 
172-182. 



O 



"Old Creole Days," Cable's, 
175. 

Opportunity, America as the land 
of, 285. 



337 



INDEX 



Orchestras in modern America, 

211-212. 
Otis, James, 109. 



Page, Thomas Nelson, 175. 
Painting, American, 194-203. 
Palmer, work in sculpture by, 208. 
Pamphlets of Revolutionary 

period, 108. 
Parish schools of Roman Catholic 

Church, 222. 
Parkman, Francis, 170. 
Partridge, William Ordway, 209. 
Pasteur, Louis, on democracy, 

20. 
Peale, American painter, 194, 196. 
Pedagogy, education in, 258-259. 
Penn, William, 55. 
Pennsylvania, settlement of, 55- 

56. 
"Pere Goriot," a Parisian rather 

than French novel, 173. 
Perry, Bliss, 186. 
Philadelphia, painters of, 196. 
Physical training at American 

colleges, 241-242. 
Pilgrims, the, 51. 
"Pilot," Cooper's, 146. 
Pioneers in Western States, 85-87. 
Plymouth, Mass., settlement of, 

44. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, consideration 

of work of, 149-152. 
Poetry, comparative decline in 

vogue of, 184; modern ex- 
ponents of, 185 ; themes of 

present-day, 185-186. 
Political organization of American 

nation, 274-275. 
Politicians and good-fell owship, 

291-292. 
Polytechnic Institute, Troy, 258. 



Powers, "Greek Slave" of, 204; 
limitations of, as a sculptor, 
206. 

Pratt, Bela, 209. 

"Precaution," Cooper's, 146. 

Prescott, W. H., 169. 

Presidents of United States, 
education and intellectual at- 
tainments of, 14-16, 245-246. 

Princeton University, 220. 

Protection, policy of, contrasted 
with customary self-reliance of 
Americans, 284. 

Puritanism, rise of, 47-48; char- 
acteristics of, 48 ff . ; the 
spirit of freedom in, 50. 



Q 



Quakers in America, 55-56 ; John 
Wool man a notable represent- 
ative of the, 116-118. 

Queen Anne architecture in 
America, 193, 193. 



Races, variety of, in composition 
of Americans, 42-60; inter- 
mingling of, in every nation, 
267-269. 

Radcliffe College, 237. 

Railroads, transcontinental, 90. 

"Red Rover," Cooper's, 146. 

Reform movements in America, 
323-325. 

Religion, place of, in American 
civilization, 317 ff. 

Republicans, early party of, led 
by Jefferson, 79. 

Research work at universities, 
260-261 ; special foundations 
for, 262 ff. 

Rhodes, James Ford, 172. 



338 



INDEX 



"Rip Van Winkle," Irving's, 
123. 

"Rise of Silas Lapham," Howells', 
179-180. 

Rockefeller Institute for Medical 
Research, 262-263. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, 15-16. 

"Rubaiyat," Vedder's illustra- 
tions for, 198-199. 

Ruckstuhl, "Spirit of the Con- 
federacy" of, 209. 

Russell Sage Foundation for 
investigation and eradication 
of causes of poverty and ig- 
norance, 265. 



Sabbath, the American, 318- 

319. 
Saint Gaudens, Augustus, 207. 
St. Paul's School, 225. 
Sargent, John S., 203. 
Scale, impress of, on American 

literature, thought, and charac- 
ter, 298 ff. 
"Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne's, 

143-144. 
Schools, early American, 214 ff. 

See Education. 
Schouler, James, 172. 
"Science of English Verse," 

Lanier's, 165. 
Scientific universities, 257-258. 
Scotch-Irish in America, 55, 56, 

57, 58. 
Sculpture, American, 203-210. 
Sedgwick, Henry D., 186. 
Shaw Memorial, Boston, 208. 
Sherborne house, Portsmouth, 

190. 
Sherman Memorial, New York, 

208. 
"Sketch Book," Irving's, 122. 



Slavery, introduction of, 43; 
restiveness of Americans under 
existence of, and final destruc- 
tion, 323. 

Smith, John, narrative of ad- 
ventures of, 105. 
| Smith College, 237. 

South, the settlers of the, 42-44, 
56-58; fiction writers of the, 
174-176; activities of General 
Education Board concerning 
the, 263; effect of climate on 
men and manners in the, 297- 
298. 

Southern Education Board, 264- 
265. 

"Spy, The," Cooper's, 145, 146- 
147. 

"Star-Spangled Banner, The," 
155, 210-211. 

State government, lines of demar- 
cation between national govern- 
ment and, 75-77, 156. 

State universities, 247-248, 251- 
253; pedagogic training in, 
258. 

Steamboat, invention of the, 82- 
83. 

Stevens Institute, 258. 

Story, William Wetmore, 208- 
209. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 178-179. 

Stuart, Gilbert, 194, 196. 

Suffrage, American belief in uni- 
versal, 17. 

Supreme Court, functions of the, 
275; decision that America 
is a Christian nation, 320-321. 

Swedish blood in America, 56, 58. 



Taft, Lorado, 210. 
Taft, William H., 15. 



339 



INDEX 



Tariff, the American, 284. 

Teachers, pensions for, by Car- 
negie Foundation, 264. 

Teachers College, Columbia Uni- 
versity, 258. 

Teaching, training in science of, 
258-259. 

Tennessee mountaineers in fiction, 
176. 

Thackeray, W. M., on Irving, 123. 

"Thanatopsis," Bryant's, 128, 
145. 

Thoreau, H. D., "Maine Woods" 
of, contrasted with White's 
"Natural History of Sel- 
bourne," 310. 

"To a Waterfowl," Bryant's, 135 ; 
reason for tendency to morali- 
zation in, 301-302. 

"Tom Sawyer," 176. 

Trumbull, American painter, 196. 

Tuskegee Institute, 283. 



TJ 



"Uncle Remus" stories, 176. 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 178-179. 

Universities, American, 219-220, 
245 ff.; state, 247-248, 251- 
253 ; educational influence 
from Europe upon American, 
254-257; scientific, 257-258; 
close relation of technical train- 
ing of all kinds with, 259-260. 

University, significance of the 
word, as applied to American 
educational institutions, 253- 
254. 



Van Dyke, Henry, 185, 186. 
"Vanity Fair," not a national 

novel, 173. 
Vassar College, 237. 



Vedder, Elihu, 198-199. 
Vespucci, Amerigo, 41. 
Virginia, the settlers of, 42-44; 

beginnings of education in, 

215-216. 
Virginia, University of, 113, 220. 
Virginia Company, educational 

plans of, 215. 
"Virginian," Wister's, 181. 

W 

"War and Peace," as a national 
novel, 173. 

War between the States, mis- 
conception of, by foreign na- 
tions, 8; birth of the Nation 
dating from, 153, 158. 

Ward, J. Q. A., 207. 

Washington, George, 15, 44; the 
guiding genius of America, 70- 
71, 73 ; election to Presidency, 
77 ; bequest by, for founding of 
a national university, 219-220. 

Wealth, vastness of increase of, 
in America, and effects, 311- 
314. 

Wellesley College, 237. 

Wells College, 237. 

West, development of the, 83 ff. ; 
fiction dealing with the, 176- 
177; effect of climate on men 
and manners in the, 298. 

West, Benjamin, 196, 197. 

Whistler, J. NcN., 200-202. 

White, William Allen, 181. 

Whitman, Walt, discussion of 
work of, 160-164. 

Whitney, Eli, 83. 

Whittier, J. G., 136. 

William and Mary College, 218. 

Wilson, Woodrow, 15 ; on keep- 
ing the doors of opportunity 
open to Americans, 289. 



340 



INDEX 



Wister, Owen, 177, 181. 

Women, college education for, 
236-238. 

Woodberry, G. E., 185. 

Woolman, John, 116-118. 

Wren, Sir Christopher, inspira- 
tion of, in American colonial 
architecture, 189-190. 

Wyant, Alexander H., 198, 199. 



Yale College, founding of, 218; 
spirit actuating athletics at, 
241 ; significance of word 
"university" as applied to, 
253. 

Yorktown, epoch-making sur- 
render of British at, 68. 



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